Olive Leaves Memories

2024

Commissioned by MMAG and exhibited at How to Time Travel curated by Rana Beiruti, assistant curation Ranwa Abughoush.


Paper, olive leaves, plastic, thread, silver gelatin paper
23x30x1.90 cm

Olive Leaves Memories is a folding book that pays homage to the olive tree in a time when unfolding violence has empeded what should have been a sacred harvest season. 

The handmade book holds space for the olive tree and recalls its stories through a visual record of its traces and marks. By embedding the leaves within recycled plastic and using them to form photograms, it is a multifaceted and collaborative endeavour between the artist and the olive tree. The book itself is bound with threads dyed with pigment extracted from the olive leaves. 

The book is a call to listen to the land and its memories, with particular reference to the olive tree, its ancestral significance and its capability of outliving generations. 

All the leaves used were collected from a tree in the backyard of the home the artist grew up in.