SHETAH ESH
A selection of 10 photographs from a 22-part series, accompanied by three of six texts written in the aftermath.
Shetah Esh (Fire Zone) is a photographic series created across various sites in Palestine-Israel, Tabarya, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Yaffa, Latrun, the Naqab, and others, before October 7th, 2023. Originally intended as a meditation on the land’s water borders (between the river and the sea), the project shifted entirely once it became clear that the entire territory, from the river to the sea, had become a fire zone, physically, symbolically, and spiritually.
Shot in black and white, the 22 images hold tension between destruction and tenderness, longing and witnessing. In these photographs, bodies do not stand apart from the land, they emerge from it, vanish into it, grieve with it.
Fire is everywhere: as threat, as history, as consequence. The land burns, and so do its people.
Accompanied by six poetic texts in English, Shetah Esh is a work of direct mourning. It carries no metaphor for its political context. Instead, it lays bare the exhaustion and the ache of a place continually erased and redrawn through violence. The work resists abstraction through its clarity, and yet, there is softness in its gaze.
This is not a landscape project. It is a reckoning.
1.
There’s the sea in my name.
I belong to the water, and it belongs to me.
Because when land is taken, water is the only thing left that can’t be owned,
no matter what they tell themselves.
Once, a kabbalist rabbi told me my obsession with the sea made sense.
He said it was my destiny.
Yam.
A few days ago, I dreamt the sea was on fire.
6.
In the Land, fire zones are everywhere.
They devour kilometers of ground, plants, rocks, trees.
Houses too.
Memory of
Because before a place becomes a fire zone,
they destroy the homes,
displace the locals,
cut off the water,
terrorize the children.
So that by the time the fire comes,
there is nothing left to burn.
It’s as if there was nothing there.
I mean,
as if they had always been there.
Surveillance towers, checkpoints, walls.
Danger. Firing area 918.
Danger. Firing area 624.
Danger. Firing area 105.
Entrance forbidden.
Entrance forbidden.
Entrance forbidden.
2.
Maybe it’s just geography. Coordinates.
Where, in cold countries, fire is warmth,
wood crackling in a chimney,
here, in the Levant,
it hasn’t meant comfort in a long time.
The sun would have been enough.
Dayenu
