Home is where your heart is
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Dates2025 - Ongoing
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Author
A love letter born of grief and memory, this project weaves personal archives, messages, and images from Palestine into a tender act of resistance preserving connection, history, and love in the face of loss, distance, and the erasure of genocide.
This project is a love letter that trembles between tenderness and grief, written from memory, absence, and the longing to hold on to what once was and may never be again.
These are letters that resist the erasure of genocide, fragments caught between fog, death, and the thirst of my loved ones. It is a history rewritten by them, and by the fragments of my own memory that once lived in this space a relationship of more than a decade, where I built a family. Home is where your heart is.
Eleven years ago, I began photographing in Palestine. Over time, the bonds I formed grew deep, and the people who welcomed me into their lives turned that place into a second home. But since 2023, that home has begun to fracture: memories now carry the echo of bombs, of absence, death, text messages filled with fear, and the anxiety of knowing that what I hold in memory and in physical objects may never return may already be lost.
This series is also an act of preservation: of memory, of connection, of what still resists. It is pieced together through images and fragments of words messages, videos sent from under siege, photographs from my personal archive, and new images documenting the transformation of the landscape in the aftermath of genocide, occupation, starvation, and destruction.
What does it mean to hold on to the last bar of olive oil soap sent by your second family? To cling to its scent, not knowing if it will ever be replaced.
To wonder if the thread that connects us will break. If the soap will dissolve, like memory, because we are separated by 12,041 kilometers.
While my daughter plays with her toys, the son of my friends digs his out from the rubble. In her play, I recognize the ruins of those we love, now buried beneath them.
In the midst of fire, violence, and devastation, I receive a message: I love you. I love you like a soft pillow that soothes my thoughts for a second, only to become anxiety, the fear of losing you, of remembering your last I love you.
I hold on to every object in my home because it is part of who I am, part of you, part of the memory we built together.
This project is my love letter to you written in fear that it might be the last. Each message asking are you still alive? becomes part of the memory that clings to every corner, every object. Because in the downpour of messages, a thread of connection survives.
A compilation of personal archive images, videos, and messages sent by loved ones fragments that embody the lived reality in Palestine. A record. A resistance. A love that endures.
Because home is where the heart is.