About the Project

This project began as a question of story telling. How could I share the fraught realities of Israel and Palestine with a larger audience in a more layered and nuanced way than what makes the news? 

Through daily postcard snapshots [that endure for longer than a Snapchat or TikTok], I hope to capture and share the strange intricacies and surreal dissonance of daily life and violence in Israel and Palestine.

How does the message on the back interact with the idealized image on the front?

The project has since grown to also interrogate routes of communication and the shifting from a virtual space to a concrete object which will pass from me to its recipient and be held in the hands of many others along the way. A postcard is very public: anyone can read what is written on the back. Who knows who will come across my message?

My list of addresses to send postcards to soon became a challenge in and of itself: can I send mail to my friend in Beirut? In Cairo? In Dubai? In Ramallah? What are the implications of the Israeli stamp and the Israeli post on crossing borders and forging bonds throughout the region? Will me and my friend in Dubai be black-listed for communicating? Will the message ever arrive?

The title of [un]Holy Land is meant to reflect my own questions of what does holiness mean? How does the construction of Israel as a holy place interact with the very profane, and even unholy, events of daily life? 

Postcards were mailed out, and hopefully reached their destinations, and definitely had an adventure along the way.

See the whole project here.

See published articles about postcards and multimodal ethnographies here.