Emily Jacir's Memorial
to 418 Palestinian Villages Which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948

Amanda Walters

Initiated by Palestinian-American artist Emily Jacir in 2001, the tent is a community based project memorializing the Palestinian villages that were not only depopulated and destroyed, but erased from th map altogether, as if they never existed. Jacir stenciled the names of all the Palestinian villages archived in the Walid Khalidi book All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 onto a family sized refugee tent that she constructed in her studio. Jacir invited people, mostly Palestinian, and many who were from the villages memorialized in this project, into her studio to embroider the names while socializing, exchanging stories, and memories of the villages.