The act of collecting data is a performative act, in which ima becomes a ‘curious tourist’, a ‘detective’, a ‘journalist’ or any other identity as needed at the time. This already enables an active reflection at an early stage of the research. When I collect data, the data ‘collects’ me, in other words, action that is done with an enhanced awareness has the potential to affect me. Enhanced awareness is achieved by creating an intervention and an interruption which are part of the method of ima.

Emulsion is used in my works. It is a link to the following memory. Palestinian decorators had been employed by the kibbutz and occasionally gave me some emulsion for my paintings.

Laura U. Marks asks: ‘Where meaningful knowledge is located?’ It is between cultures, therefore ‘can never be fully verified in the terms of one regime or the other.’[1] Amongst alternative ways to express and produce knowledge, according to Marks, is ‘the very lack of images or memories, itself a meaningful record of what can be expressed.’[2] These quotations are relevant in the context of the invisible presence of the Palestinians and their suffering in my childhood landscape. This childhood was a Palestinian-free zone. One makes a special effort to increase awareness of the ‘other’ (Palestinian) invisibility.

Here, memory was used in bringing material from the past – emulsion - to the present. The past is therefore revisited from the point of consciousness of the present, through materiality. This echoes Foucault’s quotation of Kant’s philosophical question: ‘What are we?’[3] While the Cartesian question: Who are we? implies a universal subject, according to Foucault:

‘Kant’s question appears as an analysis of both us and our present [...] Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time and of what we are in this very moment. Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to built up what we could be to get rid of this kind of political “double bind,” which is the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures.’[4]

This act of revisiting the past is enabled through materiality and imagination. In that sense, through the art work we ‘build up what we could be.’[5]  

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[1] Laura U. Marks, The Skin of The Film, Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 2000,

p. 24.

[2] Ibid, p.24.

[3] Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’ in Brian Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, 1996, p. 423.

[4] Ibid, pp. 423-424.

[5] Ibid, p. 424.