Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Ex-communicated: Landscapes of Occupation in Palestine

An excellent Alternate Focus documentary by US communications-academic Gary Fields which examines Palestine through the lens of landscape. Fields does a great job with photographs and with the narration, highlighting the peaceful civil resistance campaigns at Bil’in and Budros.  Thanks to Sonja Karkar for passing it on. R/t 28 mins

Ex-Communicated tells the story of Israeli occupation in Palestine through the genre of landscape and the perspective of a camera lens.  In his series of remarkable photographs, Gary Fields, a professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego takes us behind the walls, gates, and fences of this deliberately fragmented geography in revealing Palestinian life under Israeli military rule.  What he shows in these images is how the forces of occupation use the landscape as an instrument of control over Palestinians and a mechanism for dispossessing them of land and property.  Much of this story is untold and largely unseen.  These photos convey forcefully how the process of enclosure on the landscape has “ex-communicated” Palestinians, immobilizing them into ever-diminishing spaces, while at the same time inspiring them into heroic acts of peaceful resistance.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Information

This entry was posted on 22 January, 2009 by in History, Palestine, Video, Zionism and tagged , , , , .

Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


Categories