Tracing Around Her - Location: Israel
This is an ongoing project where I photograph the village and house my great grandmother lived in since before Israel was declared a nation. When I was five years old, my parents moved us to America. We never settled down long enough in one home for it to actually feel like home. This is the only house in my life that has been a constant. I have always seen it as the most magical place in the world. For the past three years, I have continuously returned to document the life around the village, my grandfather, as well as the belongings my great grandmother left behind. In documenting the house, my connection to Israel has grown deeper, and I have reignited old memories and scents that I wouldn’t have reconnected with otherwise. Shortly after I began documenting the house, something started to happen that was very difficult for me to accept. When my great grandmother passed, my grandfather demolished the inside of the house and reconstructed it to his liking so that he could be more comfortable upon moving in. I realized that while I was finally uncovering a connection to my birthplace, I was simultaneously documenting the destruction of my family history.
The two films I made during my stay are titled, “The Renovation,” and “ The Four Arteries of the Heart”. I had a show titled “She Forgot My Name,” at the Cooper Union in New York in 2020 that displayed these works.