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With 38 Days of Re-Collection, we glimpse scenes of aesthetic plenitude, just beyond reach. Beyond reach because the images are flattened, obscured, fragmented, blurred and discolored. Their supports are irregular, each being singular, being ripped from walls, ripped from time, opening layers of the past. They are portals to the past, peeled-away strata, archaeological traces.

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In his incessant attempts to mend together pieces of a world that no longer exists, Sabella’s process of recollection subsequently emerged in the fragility of fragments of wall paint where the photographed past shatters like a mirror in one’s home. Here, a poetics of time unravels in the fleeting moment, photographed such that the fragment resembles a chip of pottery from an archeological site.

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Here the map becomes a signifier without a referent, a simulacrum of simulacra, a token of powerlessness and the arbitrary nature of maps. In a kind of premonition about the overpowering force of maps, the scraped fragment evokes both roots and routes… A rich intersectional past of Jerusalem, with its shared aesthetic of house and home by neighbors belonging to various religious and ethnic communities, is conjured up through Sabella’s fragments. Within a multi-chronotopic perspective, the series takes the viewer on an imaginary return to a disappeared time and place. But by actively joining fragments from different houses, the artwork remixes the old fragments into new neighboring aesthetic units. From the remains, new possibilities are composed. Perhaps only through such acts of vivid recollection of places/times, of “plurilog,” can a reimagined conviviality be pieced together anew.

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Moreover, focusing on the house’s contents rather than its outward facade suggests that we as viewers become privy to that which is usually kept from sight, is untold and unseen. Palestinian grief and loss haunts these occupied houses. Subtly Sabella unearths this. His strategy is a paradoxical one though, and in its own terms, one of displacement… Though this is a defiant gesture against erasure, it also shows the difficulty of Palestinian memory being preserved at the locus delicti. Sabella has to first transform these shards of wall into objects of the past and undo them from their current ontology as functioning walls. In fact, by peeling the plaster off the wall, he cuts short their timeline. No longer do they stand witness to history; now they have become history. It is a reversed archaeology of sorts.

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Brought into the light, they show an unexpected result. The newly created objects are like found pieces of a time that tells of the many-faceted past that exists in our present and yet cannot be pinned down to any specific era. “With those tile-like structure images, people think at first that these are found objects, almost archeological artifacts – Steve explains – but you and I know that they are an illusion.”

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Sabella’s archaeological-seeming fragments, peeled from the Old City walls of his native Jerusalem with a surgeon‘s care and precision, reach deeper into layers of time and memory. He then awakens them, bringing them back to life through his photography. In the first moments of viewing them, one catches oneself wondering if they aren’t actually antique depictions. The onlooker falls silent at their vivid appeal, to then give way and sink into the fragments. Only the silence itself, one that allows a contemplative air to resonate and breathe, seems to do them justice.

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