The Presence of Absence. Dust, Light, and Return.

38 Days of Re-Collection began with a house. In 2009 I rented an occupied home in Ein Karem, Jerusalem — a Palestinian house seized in 1948 and inhabited since by Israeli families. For thirty-eight days I moved through its rooms as guest and witness at once, carrying the Palestinian Right of Return in my body. One question kept returning: how does one live in another’s home and not feel the lives expelled from it?

I photographed the place obsessively: the kitchen with its dangling pans, drawers of cutlery, portraits and children’s drawings, shoes by the door, the view from barred windows. What unsettled me was not only what I saw, but how seamlessly daily life continued above a history that had been erased from view. The ethical line blurred between testimony and intrusion — yet I could not look away.

Years later, in the Old City of Jerusalem, the images found their ground. I began collecting what most people discard: flakes of paint and plaster peeled from walls — including fragments from the house where I was born and grew up. Layer after layer, the walls disclosed their hidden histories: turquoise, ochre, pink, and countless shades in between— each stratum a trace of lives that passed through, and of what later coats tried to conceal. The rumour spread that there was a strange artist roaming around, collecting nothing. Soon, people began calling me The Dust Collector.

Scraping became excavation — except what I was digging into was not stone but image: researching origins, tracing genealogies, following visual clues back to what had been there before. I entered homes, bakeries, and abandoned buildings marked for collapse, rescuing fragments before they turned back to sand. I pressed them between glass plates and carried them through Ben Gurion Airport’s security queues like someone smuggling archaeological evidence. The scanners could read density, not the histories embedded in pigment.

Back in Berlin, I returned to the darkroom. I transformed the color digital photographs from Ein Karem into black-and-white film negatives. I brushed light-sensitive emulsion onto the shards, then projected and fixed the images onto their fragile skins. What followed was alchemy: the photographs dissolved into the fragments’ colors, becoming neither purely photograph nor purely ruin. What emerged were singular objects, materially fragile and vulnerable, holding what Hubertus von Amelunxen described as “the presence of absence and the absence of presence.”

Working with the fragments altered my relationship to Jerusalem itself. The city had long lived in me as weight — as inheritance carried on the back. Peeling the walls was not only an act of recovery; it was an act of release. Each fragment I lifted removed something that had lodged inside me for years.

In this sense, 38 Days of Re-Collection does not seek to restore a house as it once was. It proposes another form of return: one that operates through image, matter, and imagination. As the fragments accumulated, I understood that I was no longer collecting debris but assembling another kind of archive. These were not ruins pointing backward, but surfaces capable of carrying new constellations of history and memory forward. The fragment became a site where past and present could coexist without cancelling one another.

Edges resemble borders; stains resemble maps; yet nothing settles into certainty. The work insists that home is not only a place, but an architecture of belonging — shaped by who is allowed to stay, who is forced to leave, and who is made invisible in the telling. In this sense, Ella Shohat’s notion of dis/placement becomes a way of reading: a method for unsettling what has been made to look settled.

These fragments do not illustrate loss; they expose it and resurrect it. They hold simultaneity: past inside present, present rearranging the past. A kitchen utensil becomes biography. A tile pattern becomes memory reborn. The private interior becomes a public question. The viewer leans in, close, as if listening to a wall speak.

38 Days of Re-Collection is a meditation on the house as evidence: rupture and continuity, what can be covered over and still remain. Georges Didi-Huberman writes: “We need pictures to create history, but we also need imagination to re-see these images, and thus, to re-think history.” Re-collection, then, is not nostalgia. It is an act of re-seeing: gathering shards and gathering oneself, until the image is no longer an instrument of domination, but a space opened by imagination.

DAR Journal
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