Trees are intergenerational plants, living as long as humans and many much longer, constituting both records of past events and devices that respond to present conditions. In the context of Palestine, trees have been weaponised by the Zionist project, altering natural and cultural landscapes based on the manufactured image of a desolate land. On the other hand, ancient trees have remained as the only survivors of wiped-out Palestinian villages, witnessing the continuous changes to the land. In Palestine, where land is at the centre of a political struggle and histories of land uses have a contemporary urgency, could trees help reconstruct a landscape that has been largely altered? This project traces scars and erasures in the Palestinian landscape using trees as archeological matter and as non-human agents with which it renarrates lost practices. It weaves between biology, oral history and language to help turn trees into material and mythical story-telling devices, reclaiming land as relational rather than a property ready for colonial extraction.
