Yamm is a video work that captures Ruba Salameh’s persistent return to a ready-made object, namely a bus stop in Salah Al-din Street in East Jerusalem – where a huge billboard print of the sea of Gaza stands out in its vast presence against awaiting passengers and passersby. The fading paper, its wear and tear, the marks of time and human intervention, led to Ruba’s recurrent attempts to document the object, haunted by the notion of its very disappearance.
The video captures the heart of everyday life in Jerusalem with as its background the remains of a still Gazan sea that is animated by an insertion of film fragments shot from the beach at Tantoura, a Palestinian village demolished in 1948;
Shown in Ramallah, the work ties together the fragmentary nature of Palestinian geography: Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the territory of 1948. For many Palestinians traveling the route of this very map has become an impossibility.
Trapped within the sea’s deteriorating image and reassembled sounds of the street and the sea, we implicit told of collective stories that were endlessly told – those of memory, catastrophes and peoples; and those that are waiting to tell themselves, in precise detail, temporal choreography, slapstick tableaus- streetwise.
