Emily Jacir’s letter to a friend, part of a recent programme dedicated to the artist at Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival, is an epistolary account of her house, Dar Jacir, in Bethlehem, Palestine.
by Jessica McGoff
The collation of images in Emily Jacir’s letter to a friend feels like a testimony, or maybe a deposition. She made the film in 2019. In May 2021, Dar Jacir, which also serves as an artist-run practice and research space, was raided and damaged by occupying forces. The images in Jacir’s letter serve to corroborate the same thing: where to find her, Dar Jacir, and Palestine.
letter to a friend (Emily Jacir, 2019)
i. in the media
The source of much of Jacir’s found footage is recognisable through its now familiar aesthetic, the low-quality, wobbly first-person reportage produced and disseminated by the news media. Jacir presents a video of tear gas attacks, shot by a journalist, depicting a group of soldiers framed by the white smoke trails and small explosions in the distance. It’s a clip that plays well in the conventions of rolling news broadcasts, but Jacir guides us to an alternative reading of the image. As the video unfolds, she tells us that her house “is on the right.” Jacir quietly but precisely foregrounds a sense of the domestic over the spectacle that news media trades in, an unexpected reminder of the everyday within the aberrant.
Jacir’s direction of attention on her house confronts the inherent problems that come with the documentation of crisis. There is rarely an uncomplicated answer to where and why these images are produced. Jacir states that when the media report on the tear gas attacks on her street, they only mention the camps that surround her house: “I’m not sure if it is because they cannot tell the difference…or maybe it is simply not sexy to mention houses which are not part of the camps.” This presentation of Palestine is caught up within the industrial interests of the news media. It’s a rendering of crisis that both heightens and condenses, functioning to profit as much as to inform.
letter to a friend (Emily Jacir, 2019)
ii. in archival photographs
Jacir presents dozens of photographs taken by her family of the Jerusalem-Hebron road, from the late 1880s to around 1914. Her house endures in the now discoloured, fraying documents, along with the faces of the family members who built it, and lived in it. Proof of life, not just of land.
letter to a friend (Emily Jacir, 2019)
iii on a map (then)
The first map of the Jerusalem-Hebron road presented is from 1931. Jacir refers to the road as an “artery,” rendering bodily the violence of the lines that signify demarcations of the land. The dark borders and lines of the apartheid wall that increase with every updated map are like cuts and slashes done by scalpel, rather than drawn by ink.
iv. on a map (now)
The visual impact of maps, for Jacir, still does not “capture the reality of the situation on the ground.” So Jacir, with her camera, becomes a cartographer. She attempts to film every street in Bethlehem and every inch of her house. It’s an impulse similar to that of many corporate attempts to capture and store a visual record of the world. Jacir’s singular autonomy feels in opposition to these mammoth corporate databases, calling attention to the politics of the database; what gets recorded and how it is labelled. Try and find Jacir’s house on Google Maps, you can click through to “walk” her street on their Street View function. If you try and view Rachel’s Tomb, the religious shrine revered by Muslim, Christian and Jewish women for centuries, you’re faced only with the concrete walls erected by Israel to effectively annex the site completely. Google Maps lists Rachel’s Tomb as a Bus Stop. There is no Google Street View in Gaza.
Jacir finds yet another alternative way to store her cartography: in her body. She starts to count steps. Can an embodied measurement of land make up for the problems of printed and digital maps? Jacir attempts to capture the “reality of the situation” as lived, as walked, as counted.
letter to a friend (Emily Jacir, 2019)
letter to a friend (Emily Jacir, 2019)
v. in memory
Jacir admits that she’s attempted visual cartography before, as a child, when she tried to capture every part of her house in her memory. Maybe removing the image from the means of reproduction, and all the thorny contexts and mediation inherent in the process, will preserve some untouched, untampered-with account?
But, we’re spurned again. Jacir confronts the (im)possibilities of memory by telling her friend Rihab’s story. Jacir presents photos taken by Rihab, during a tear gas attack on her street. Rihab was shot in the leg while taking the photographs, the bullet a sudden realisation as she focused elsewhere with her camera. When examining the photos the next day, Rihab finds she has taken the picture of the Israeli sniper who shot her. She tells Jacir: “my lens captured what my eyes could not at the time.” Rihab’s experience is testimony to the fundamental flaws in perspective, in our inherent lack of objectivity and lack of access to our peripherals. Our own memory, sometimes even our own vision, is as precarious and contingent on perspective as any other form of image capture.
vi. in the future
The purpose of Jacir’s letter to her friend is to ask if it would be possible for forensic architecture to conduct an investigation before a crime has been committed. She asks her friend, “please begin an investigation about my family home in Bethlehem'' before an incident occurs. It’s difficult not to detect the bitter irony in her request, as she talks of gathering enough evidence for future legal proceedings, knowing the absolute lack of recourse within the legal system of the occupying forces (and further within international relations).
To conduct an investigation that preempts erasure is to recognise the inevitability of that erasure. To know that, despite the photographs, despite the maps, despite the media footage, despite the memory: this place will be erased. And yet, the letter’s request stands also as an act of resistance, for all of this evidence points not only to a crime scene of the future but one that is happening perpetually in the present. Jacir’s images are evidence not only of Palestine’s existence but also of its continual colonial erasure.
Even with Jacir’s prevision, the ransacking of Dar Jacir that followed the creation of this film felt sudden, dizzying. The brutality of the attempted erasure of Dar Jacir is undiluted by its foretelling.
letter to a friend (Emily Jacir, 2019)
vii. in the question
The collation of sources and the gathering of evidence that attest to the existence of Jacir’s home and country asks: why should we have to strategise to find Palestine? The question itself is a testimony: to the continual erasure of land, culture and life. Jacir’s letter to her friend is one of varying temporality, a documentation of the past for future reparations, but its very existence signals a vital, urgent present. As Jacir states in a post-script, “I recorded this letter to you, from the inside of my home, so we can have a record of that.”
Dar Jacir has issued a statement, “We will rebuild.” For updates on Dar Jacir follow their Instagram.
To help fund programmes providing access to essential health services in Palestine, please consider donating to the Medical Aid for Palestinians fund.
Emily Jacir’s film Tal Al Zaatar (2014) is currently streaming as part of Another Screen’s free ongoing online programme, For a Free Palestine: Films by Palestinian Women.
Jessica McGoff is a writer and video essayist. She has been published in the likes of MUBI Notebook, CinemaScope and Another Gaze. Her video work has been shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Glasgow Short Film Festival.
This text was originally written as part of Alchemy Film & Arts and LUX Scotland writing workshops, in partnership with The Skinny.