Diaries from Wadi Al-Sarar explores collective walking as a counter-mapping practice. It began in 2020–2021 with walks in a small valley in Beit Hanina, Jerusalem, during COVID-19. These walks responded both to movement restrictions and to the valley’s rapid transformation through new housing projects, Israeli settlement expansion, and settler highways consuming the last open lands. The project grew into a research practice tracing ecological, social, and historical change, documenting how communities, water, plants, animals, and waste converge in the valley.
In later years, we extended the walks along the valley’s path toward the Mediterranean, crossing the separation wall, settler roads, Israeli-planted forests, and settlements. These walks reimagined connections between Palestinian villages severed by colonial infrastructures and traced Palestinian histories in sites destroyed in 1948 through more-than-human presences. Oral histories shared by refugees about these places added further layers of memory and documentation.
Mapping methods included diaries, photographs, and digital tools such as path tracking and 3D scanning. The project culminated in the Walker’s Log: an interactive website and a series of 20 booklets and foldouts forming counter-maps of the valley. Over four years, it encompassed exhibitions, participatory walks, and community gatherings, offering spaces for collective engagement with the valley’s layered histories and shifting realities.
