Once Upon a Solidarity, Jeddah Modernism, curated by Bricklab, 2022.
Once Upon A Solidarity is a moving image piece that seeks to unravel the connection and isolation found between the commodified spaces of Jeddah and Ramallah by journeying through a diptych: Palestine Street in Jeddah- and Al Irsal Street in Ramallah. Palestine Street acts as a microcosm to the newly adopted neoliberal and consumerist Palestine, it acts as a parallel to what can be seen in the commercial spaces of Al Irsal street. These junk spaces render a simultaneous utopian and dystopian complex linking Saudi and Palestine in ways that are strikingly different from their connection in the 1940s based on solidarity when the name of Palestine Street was initially adopted.
The film and images are a cartographic exercise that maps multiple vignettes of both areas that includes: gas station shops, factories, chandelier stores, wedding venues, the US Consulate, McDonald’s, KFC, and abandoned hotels. The framed images point to a shared globalized space that contrasts with the underlying landscape of each city. The layering of still and moving images recall the desire to connect to a sense of place. The work is searching for a common thread beyond the similarities, looking for that depth through maps, shopfronts, highways, and other varying scales of urban infrastructures within both cities.
