U nukuch che’ilo’ob chiicho’ob yéetel noolo’ob
Revisiting a Personal Archive: Stories of Land and Community in Palestine
A narrative session and collective sense-making with images, video and interviews from a personal archive.
27. September 2025
14.30-16.30
14.30-16.30
Save the Date
for adults
in English
Samir Harb will present a series of stories from his personal archive, focusing on land and landscape planning in Palestine. From 2007 to 2011, he worked as a landscape planner with rural communities to develop landscapes despite extreme Israeli occupation practices. These practices led to the deterioration of cultural traditions, agricultural productivity, and land use, culminating in widespread land destruction.
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During this period of research, various materials were gathered, including maps, photographs, video recordings, and interviews with local residents. In collaboration with his team and the villages, they developed unique surveying techniques to create maps that accurately represent the community and its land—a crucial effort given the colonial origins of many existing Palestinian maps. The core of this work involved transforming local imaginations and aspirations into concrete projects and actions to break deadlocks and initiate new endeavors in the face of strict land control.
This workshop features the personal archive, which chronicles Harb’s journey through the perspectives of the Palestinian people and their landscapes. Now, after 20 years, Harb offers to revisit this collection and share it with the public in the workshop format. These event aims to share knowledge about historic Palestine, especially in light of the ongoing genocide and occupation, as well as create a discussion around the values of the community-led research for public discourse about people and their land.
A key goal of this session is to discuss the potential uses of personal archives and the materials we create throughout our lives and careers. How can we reflect on these experiences to regenerate their significance? What, ultimately, is the meaning of a personal archive?
