Punctuated land: an exploration of conflict through photographic practice

Punctuated Land (2019-2023) is a practice-led research project that, through photography, explores the enduring legacies of conflict and the historical and political forces that enable and perpetuate its normalisation. Recurring visits to Israel/Palestine, tracing Israel’s de facto borders, and spending time in the occupied territories of the West Bank, were methods of observing how conflict gets inscribed on the verges and in the overlooked; including trees and other natural entities. This paper examines how living in ongoing conflict filters into the ground and into language, and how this informs how we view and interpret images. Traces and their photographic representation become the means to make visible the impact of maintaining dominance over the land. Practices of control and discrimination that appear in the landscape are reflected in the use of language, the interpretation of local laws, and the exercise of power over access and restrictions. While the mechanisms of violence and occupation promote a vision of this land as desolate and barren, this photographic project explores poetic and subtle visual methods to capture the traces of human presence that highlight the multiplicity of narratives and the entangled coexistence of collective memories.