Home to my paternal great grandparents, Al-Manshiyya was a Palestinian neighborhood that was once situated in the North of Jaffa. It faced paramilitary attacks and mass demolitions under a brutal Zionist colonial occupation, between 1948 and the 1980s. The neighborhood’s obliterated urban fabric was subsequently reinscribed with expansive public beach parks, tranquil hotels, and sporadic parking lots between the 1980s and the present day.
To confront the erasures of Al-Manshiyya’s infrastructure, land, and culture, I have initiated a Palestinian restorative cultural project as a postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art in London. Titled the The Image as an Archive, it was established to digitally reconstruct the most relevant architectural components of this now-absent neighborhood. To achieve these reconstructions, I referred to an extensive range of archival material, ranging from aerial images and rare photographs to personal testimonies collected from interviews and schematic drawings.
The project aims to address my hometown’s urban destruction from the regional to the material scale. In doing so, it enables its audience to reimagine the neighborhood’s vernacular past and commercialized present using contemporary methods of archiving and visualization. ■