A topographical map in shades of beige and green lies diagonally across the length of the floor, extending beyond the doorway at one end and past the glass wall at the other. My line of vision is unobstructed. I can see straight through to the outside — to the calm waters of the creek, the Jaddaf Waterfront, and the curious desert foliage offering different patterns of shade.

Dubai may have a reputation for shopping festivals, over-the-top entertainment events and its record-breaking, sky-scraping cityscape. But today, I am here for an exhibition that could not be more grounded. I am standing inside the minimalist structure of the Jameel Arts Centre, and am here to see Pre-1948: One Map, Multiple Mediums. It iscurated by Visualizing Palestine — a team of independent, non-profit researchers, designers, technologists and storytellers who “harness data-driven visual media to advance a factual, rights-based narrative on Palestine and Palestinians.”

The maps at hand, or rather, on the floor at our feet, were part of a highly detailed documentation project produced over a 28-year period, from 1920 to 1948. They are the British Mandate’s survey maps of Palestine: the most thorough and highly detailed maps of their time. Visualizing Palestine’s long-time partner, Ahmad Barclay, found them online in the Israeli National Library’s digital archive. Although accessible, they were quite difficult to work with. “You could view them and zoom in on them, but you could not download them in high resolution. You could only see them one sheet at time, not all together. There are 155 unique sheets,” Barclay explains. It was his idea to make an exhibition through which this data could be brought together and explored firsthand.

The maps were printed to their original scale at 1:20,000 and the Visualizing Palestine team developed a digital index allowing viewers to navigate through them. Visual artist Marwan Rechmaoui was also recruited to add three-dimensional renditions of the cities documented. Rechmaoui created a series of wooden sculptures portraying the 21 most populated Palestinian cities pre-1948. The cubic blocks follow the dimensions and descriptions on the sheets of maps, as well as data from NASA for accurate elevation. Together, Rechmaoui and the team called this collaboration “a national monument” — a tongue-in-cheek reference to the words of J. F. Salmon, director of the Palestine Survey (1933–38), who once wrote, “A good topographical survey should be looked upon as a national monument of the first importance.”

The amount of information these maps offer is astonishing. Cities, towns, villages, terrains, rivers, hills, valleys, types of land and vegetation, types of road and transportation, access to water, monuments of religious significance, all indicated to the minutest of detail, and all with their original Arabic names transliterated into English. It is the final and most thorough British survey map of Palestine before the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families were displaced after the State of Israel was created that year. Illegal settlements occupied the land, and the names of towns, villages and landmarks were systematically changed to Hebrew.

And now, in this Dubai art space in February 2020, more than half a century after it was originally created to chart colonized territory, this British Mandate survey of Palestine is on display in an Arab capital — a tool for shared remembering and documenting of a land that is still hijacked. Originally made to understand and control the territory as part of British and Zionist strategies in the region, today the map resurfaces as an assertion of Palestinian heritage, and to make contact with what has been made inaccessible.

Marwan Rechmaoui has a legacy of creating installations that portray how cities function, or fail to function, in the Arab world. He often uses industrial materials like cement, rubber and steel. Here, he has chosen the warmer and softer feel of wood. His wooden blocks allow a tactile experience of what has been untouchable and out of reach for most Arabs and Palestinians since 1948.

Visitors are allowed to pick up the blocks and examine them closely, tracing their fingers across various grooves. The undulating lines of the sanded down surface distinguish different terrains. Natural barriers feel different from man-made ones, and a groove at the corner indicates the land’s height in relation to sea level. It is an acquaintance with geography through touch. Children and adults alike seem intrigued, comparing their sloping surfaces and textures, and finding their corresponding locations on the map. It is an intimate discovery, a game or puzzle, and a work of supreme mathematical precision.

“The sculptures become a tool of communication and a center-point for conversations about land ownership and right of return,” explains Visualizing Palestine co-founder Joumana Al-Jabri. “Like infographics, like audio recordings, the wooden blocks add the tangible element. They are a way to engage with history more curiously, with your body.”

A young mother enters the space, a baby on her arm and six-year-old daughter by her side. “Where is Nablus? Go find Nablus for me…” she says in a songlike voice, as the little girl skips along the map. “Is it this one, mama?”

The exhibition also includes the adaptation of these maps into an open-source platform accessible to everyone for free, called Palestine Open Maps. There is also a collection of oral histories that is accessible to all, gathering the voices of Palestine people and sharing their stories of home.

The exhibition will last 10 days, with a wide variety of activities planned, some for children and families, others for scholars, artists and human-rights activists. Despite the intensive work involved in putting the display together, the Visualizing Palestine team have managed to keep the exhibition unscripted and free, inviting openness and breathability to an otherwise loaded topic. Visitors can move through and reflect for themselves.

The Movement: Soma

On the last Saturday of the exhibition, visitors are invited to a Movement Without Borders workshop on the map of pre-1948 Palestine. Guiding the session are Kris and Pav, the first an osteopath, the second a contemporary dancer. Together they have created their own form of movement practice called Soma. To use their words, it is about going back to “ground zero” to find the “form before the forms.”

“If we look at how humans use movement, we can find a wide spectrum, with free-spirited dancing and creative self-expression on one end and competitive athleticism and martial arts on the other. Both ends of the spectrum are needed in order to search for the mastery of all possibilities,” Kris explains in a rather serious tone. “The physical practice is actually nothing. Learning about yourself is what matters. It is really important to observe yourself, what goes on in your mind and how your body moves.”

“And also relax,” adds Pav, tuning into most participants’ unfamiliarity with Soma. “Enjoy what you are doing, have fun with it, be playful.” Yes, the gathering had begun in a rather somber and poignant mood. The first instruction was to walk.

“Gait says a lot about how one holds oneself, in relation to one’s self-image, and in relation to others.” The walking is slow and deliberate at times, relaxed and loose or fast and urgent at others. Instructions draw the participants’ attention to the grounding of the feet, the rotation of the shoulders, and the gaze. Agility. Strength. Perseverance. Creativity. These words are uttered to rhythmic music. Stand taller. Faster. Slower. “There are many solutions to one problem. Keep moving. There is never just one way.”

Then, more grounding and internal work. Participants are asked to stand very still and remain still. Feet apart, knees slightly bent, arms outstretched, and simply stay. Breathing deepens, muscles ache, minds focus and the temperature in the room goes up. “Can you stand it? Can you tolerate it?”

Does it matter that the maps of Palestine are at our feet now? Are people summoning unprecedented determination? Focusing on the horizon? Imagining thousand-year-old olive trees?

And then, relief, movement again. And vigorous at that. At one point, there are tennis balls on rubber strings bouncing around participants doing single-handed push-ups, while reaching with their free arm to keep following the ball. Unexpected directions, a cat-like focus and a monumental muscular effort required — it was hard work!

Many attending the session probably moved their muscles and joints that day as they never had before. There were a few who left, but mostly people stayed. By the end, people’s energies were completely spent, their faces flushed. Many young men with evident physical strength were by now drenched in sweat. Even elegant older ladies wearing button-down blouses and proper trousers showed a kind of exhilaration at having been called to the challenge, and the unexpected exertion of it all.

Many of the Soma workshops take place at art galleries. “It draws a certain type of crowd,” Kris observes. “The ones who are trying to look from outside the box, prepared to look beyond, prepared to do something different.”

Neither one of the instructors is directly connected to the Palestinian story. Kris is of Indian-Irish descent while Pav, short for Pavlina, is Cypriot. “We don’t have the same connection to Palestine as the people who were attending the workshop. In full respect to them, we wanted to make sure we didn’t say ‘we know how you feel,’” Kris explains. “What we were comfortable with expressing in the workshop was our understanding that the exhibition, in relation to the mandate period and the historical context, are also very present now...”

The Story: A Fantastical Flyby

There is an informal closing event hosted by Visualizing Palestine co-founder Joumana Al-Jabri. Some 40 or so people gradually arrive, young and old, familiar faces from the past few days. We stroll towards the garden in the slant of the afternoon sun. Clusters of drum-like cushions are strewn about between the plants and the colonnade of the arts center, making an informal open circle. In the middle are four wooden blocks representing the topography of Jerusalem.

“Thank you all for being here. I am not sure what I am going to say today. I curated this exhibition with a certain idea in mind, but, in the process, something else came up. About how we approach things. About what it means to care. I’m still making my way through it,” Al-Jabri says, sincerely and unapologetically.

“Some of you know me already. I’m an architect by training, so orienting to structure and space is not far from my interest in the body and in movement.” She pauses, standing in the middle of the space as we listen. There is a deep intensity and deliberateness to her words. “This is all unscripted and experimental. I don’t know what I’m going to do. And it might be that what I say doesn’t make sense.”

In this light and airy scene, it feels like even the desert trees are listening, and music from a nearby sound installation inadvertently adds to the mood. Al-Jabri is walking around “Jerusalem” now, wringing her hands, as if gathering herself to speak her truth.

“I didn’t grow up there,” she says. “I don’t have Palestinian blood. I don’t have childhood memories. But I grew up in a home where we spoke about Palestine every day. Many of us here grew up in homes where Palestine was at the heart of our family discussions, where Palestine hung on the walls of our schools.”

Unexpectedly, Al-Jabri then dons a dark cape and wraps it around herself. “Jerusalem,” she says.

She extends her limbs and sweeps the cape over the centerpiece, the fabric swooping in a ripple over the city. “The first time I ever heard of Jerusalem, it was a fantasy.” Another swish of her cape, “A fantasy flyby!”

She is referring to the sacred story of Al-Isra’ wal- Mi’raj. It is said that the Prophet Muhammad flew on the back of a fantastical Pegasus-like creature called Buraq from his home in Medina, in the Arabian Peninsula, all the way to Jerusalem. There, he prayed and then ascended to the seven heavens with the archangel Gabriel, meeting different saints and prophets along the way, until, alone at the end, he meets God. Known as “The Night of Destiny,” it is the holiest night in the Muslim calendar, commemorated by Muslims all over the world since the seventh century.

Wonderful illustrations of this tale are found in some of the most refined Islamic manuscripts, and medieval scholars have even attributed this story as an important inspiration for Dante’s Divine Comedy in the 14th century. For us, growing up Muslim, it was as magical as a children’s tale. Al-Jabri’s summation of the whole episode so succinctly, with just few words and a gesturing sweep over the city, was a stroke of genius.

“The second time I heard of Jerusalem,” she recalls, “was in the works of a Palestinian artist, a storyteller. I didn’t know him personally, but I knew his work and the character he invented in his drawings. He wrote Hassan Everywhereand drew a smiling kid riding a colorful bicycle across the sky.” Another swish of the fabric. She moves swiftly and lightly, adding, “A happy kid that can go and see any place he likes.”

This reference was recognizable to many attendees, especially those involved in the contemporary cultural scene of the Arab region. Hassan Hourani was an internationally renowned Palestinian artist born in Hebron, in the West Bank, in 1974. He made it to New York and studied at the Art Students League there before returning home. But he died mysteriously, drowning in the Jaffa Port in 2003. Once the thriving jewel of Palestinian urbanism pre-1948, Palestinians have been barred from visiting their own towns, and this seaside capital holds a very special longing for most: to swim in the Jaffa sea.

Al-Jabri continues. “The third time was when I knew I needed to go there myself.” She felt an urgent need to go to the place where the stories belong.

“To land in a beautiful, sunlit space. And to hold oneself back from a feeling of appreciation for the space, countered with the rising sensations of being faced with signs in Hebrew.” There was an inner dissonance; the body understood. “I could not work out the stark contrast between apparent normalcy and signaled threats. Am I safe?”

Threat flooded her on a visceral level. “In the airport, in the streets, I felt both my curiosity to be there and my perception of signaled threats everywhere.”

She cowered low. As tiny as possible. “I felt shrunk. So shrunk. I couldn’t move.” Her voice a tiny frozen mouse. “I was terrified to leave my hotel.”

That was the first visit.

She then stood up and changed position.

“Then, one day, I got invited a friend’s wedding in Jerusalem.”

“Ha! Really? A wedding?”

“In Jerusalem?”

“I mean, I’ve gone to destination weddings before in Ibiza, Bali… But Jerusalem?” She laughed, surprised, standing taller, cocking her head slightly to the side. “And so, I went! Dressed for a wedding. I heard all the guests’ stories. Each one had a story of overcoming barriers and restrictions to be able to make it. And there was so much joy. And I realized, then, that all this longing for Palestine, all this…” — her hands rock thoughtfully up and down in front of her chest, as if carrying the world in her heart — “…was resolved by connecting to each other, as people.”

Sidestepping mountains of political and intellectual discourse was no small feat and offering a personal encounter, in this delicate way, struck me as brave. People were clearly touched and everyone stood up and hugged each other. It was so hard to find words, but people’s eyes were brimming.

And so, the exhibition ended with an elegant and informal performance that, paradoxically, did not scramble to leave a permanent trace but, rather, to open up space for a new experience. All kinds of information was there for the taking: where the mind had been racing to comprehend or defend or fight; where political discourses have been pounded out across all sorts of media outlets, university campuses and art spaces; where a team of dedicated people have found ways to keep coming through with a call for justice based on facts and access to knowledge. Only the body pulses now, today, alive, and that is where the experience resides.

The ending was a brave opening of the heart.

Zena Takieddine – an art historian, editor, yoga teacher and somatic experiencing practitioner. She is active in the non-profit social sector, working with vulnerable communities through creative body-mind practices that stimulate well-being and resilience.