Return and Rehabilitation

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Qawasmi Funambulist 3
Lower House (before renovations) and Sakiya’s vegetables farm.

I wrote this text while being in Boston for a few months. One morning, I opened my messages to see the news from home. Fridays and Saturdays are especially worrying. Again on December 8, 2024, settlers from the Dolev settlement next-door broke the newly renovated roof of the holy Maqam of Abu El-Enain (the father of eyes/springs) on our site. Nida Sinnokrot and I established Sakiya – Art | Science | Agriculture in the village of Ein Qiniya west of Ramallah in 2017 after operating nomadically for some years. Our location is in the West Bank’s Area C on a hill facing the village’s small built up area to the north. The site had been uninhabited since 1967 when the village fell under Israeli occupation. The Zalatimo family, the owners of the land, entrusted us with its stewardship, and renovating the houses that had fallen in disrepair. Sakiya was established as an artist project, experimental school, and a platform for curriculum development and knowledge production integrating art, environmental science, and traditional knowledge systems. It is grounded in a pedagogical framework referred to as rewilding pedagogy, which emphasizes the interplay between ecological systems and modes of learning.