Jadaliyya review: 'Remapping Palestine and the Politics of Injury' by Caabu's Head of Education

Written for Jadaliyya by Aimee Shalan

7 February

Till Roeskens, Videomappings: Aida, Palestine. Palestine/France, 2009

The struggle over Palestine, a struggle in which ideas, representations, rhetoric, and images are all fiercely contested, has been so overexposed in mainstream media in North America and Western Europe that the actual experience of Palestinians living under occupation has often disappeared from view. A preoccupation with “balance,” regardless of the asymmetry of the situation, has given vent to a seemingly vicious circle of tit-for-tat denunciations. In this context, legitimate Palestinian anger in response to decades of oppression is frequently regarded as an obstructive proclivity for “supercharged emotions” and the investment of intense, personal energies in fixed, absolute positions. The topography of Palestine has, moreover, become so layered with strategic, religious, and political strata that most onlookers do not have a coherent mental map of the territory. This is partly because Palestine is for others so charged with significance; partly because Palestinians have simply not been in a position to control the images that have been used by others to represent them; and partly because of Western media’s fixation on Palestinians as a political “problem.” All of this has done little to shed light on the scandal of Israel’s military occupation and the extent to which segregation and inequality have violated the most intimate and subjective spaces of daily life.

A documentary that is well worth watching, in this context, is Videomappings: Aida, Palestine, by visual artist Till Roeskens. The film, which was released on DVD last year, circumvents the standard flood of media coverage and enables us to perceive the Palestinian landscape that Zionist cartography has overwritten in a gripping new light. Sketching a unique picture of the occupation, Videomappings captures the assiduous and drawn out nature of its tyranny over the inhabitants of a refugee camp near Bethlehem by projecting us closely into their personal experience of the world. Compelled to follow line by line the maps they draw, we begin to discern the multiple ways they have come to navigate the ever-more-circumscribed spaces around them. The documentary won several awards, including the Grand Prix at the Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille in 2009 and the Special Jury Prize at the Tetuan Film Festival in 2010. Three of the film’s six chapters are currently available for viewing free-of-charge online.

To read the full review click here.