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Gareway to Heaven

2014

Signal channel projection, 4:46 minutes

Edition of 5 1 AP

 

To be a stateless refugee and to live that life as a recognized one, you are entitled, some day, to the right of return to your country. But to be a stateless that lives the life homelessness and asylum while you are devoid of all the documents that recognize you as a refugee, however, you dream to return to your home country, a dream passed from one generation to another yet getting stronger by time, this is hope.

 

In every corner of the refugee camps they are talking about Palestine, about the lost Paradise, a never seen homeland, an image relayed to them by their parents and grandparents, an expanding image that has become the most beautiful in the eye of their minds... I'm from there, I come from that Paradise, and day by day I live the occupation, the confiscation of land, the oppression, the changing geography and daily humiliation. The image is much more beautiful and reality is worst. There, I cannot tell them the truth; I fled the camp looking for a way out for me and for them. I am still looking.

 

This work was filmed in 2011 while I was at a working visit to one of the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Al-Talibiyyah camp.

The camp is one of six "emergency" camps established in 1968 to host 5,000 people of the Palestinian refugees and expellees who left the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a result of the Arab-Israeli war in 1967.

 

Today, this camp is inhabited by nearly 10, 000 refugees, half of them do not have residency status and are not recognized as refugees. Their living conditions are far worse than that in the picture, but they have hope.

 

 

duration 4:46 minutes