Sunday, September 23, 2012

I started teaching english at a really charming school in the Askar refugee camp just outside of Nablus. The kids are 1st through 3rd grade and they're extremely cute. Another volunteer and I painted faces there last week, which was my first experience painting faces. The spiderman's turned out looking pretty creepy, but this tiger was my proudest accomplishment.



The school sits on a hill and looks out over beautiful fields and farmlands that appear typically Palestinian except for the red slanted roofs clustered together to form an Israeli settlement. Settlements always stick out, and not on accident. Designing Civic Encounter, an urban development project in Palestine, has pointed out in the past the deliberate disconnect between the settlements design and architecture and traditional Palestinian culture, which is obvious in a scene like the one at the school. Architecturally, settlements are literally containers meant to hold and guard people, and as such their architecture is distinctly colonial. They are often atop hills, dominating the landscape, and I'm interested in the visual power that gives them and how Palestinians resist it. In this photo, the image is unmistakably Palestinian, the settlement hard to spot to the untrained eye. But looking out from the other side of the building, the landscape becomes dominated by the settlement itself.

Settlements themselves are some of the best visual representations of the dominance of the occupation over Palestinian land, tradition and lives. They themselves push the occupation from military to civilian, from political to personal. They create the event of a West Bank bus stop where settlers wait under the shade of the bus stop, while Palestinian men and women wait in the hot sun fifty feet away. I'm interested in instance such as this of visual authority imposed by the settlements, and by the occupation in general. Hopefully I'll get to writing more about it while I'm here.

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