RED BLANKET AND FLATLAND

Perhaps abstractions and experiments are a privilege, but the concrete for me has lost all meaning. The scattered remains of ideals which for me were once reality, which undoubtedly held meaning in their previous life, pressed against me in their bare materiality, stripped of significance, barely able to exist. All that remained was to experiment with these ruins, to configure and reconfigure them, my body serving as their prosthetic extension.

Can these fragments be salvaged? Can they cease being remnants of the society to which I belong and become something else, something with untapped potential?

Eram, working alongside me, was not in the business of salvaging or experimenting. She was surviving, holding on, engaging in sumud—that distinctly Palestinian practice of steadfast persistence. She is Palestinian; I am Israeli. For me, abstraction was a privilege, perhaps the only way to move beyond the ravenous murder-suicide my society commits day after day. Eram insists and persists.

Yet we worked together, guided by the voice of a third woman, Adina Bar-On, who insisted that my fragments had a place within Eram's survival and protest—that anything redemptive emerging from this land would be assembled from my fragments and her insistence.

We performed in a gallery where, by chance, images of blooming drimia plants hung behind us. In Jewish sources, the drimia was planted to mark borders between plots of land. Perhaps fragments and abstractions offer the only passage beyond these drimia in this broken terrain.

I hold onto this hope.