"Roll, River, Roll — Stereographic River, Colonial Hydropolitics"
Forthcoming, 2025
From devotional stereographs that offered turn-of-the-century pilgrims a 3-D glimpse of holiness to colonial aerial surveys that mapped the valley from above, this essay traces how photographic images both mirrored and abetted the Jordan River’s passage from sacred threshold to militarized, monopolized resource. Twin optics—illusionary depth at eye level and extractive vision from above—conspired to naturalize a hydropolitics that controlled the river and rerouted its flow. Counter-images in the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive restore ground-level pleasure, land-rooted care, and insurgent memory. Originally written for the lecture-performance that accompanies Blue-Black (Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2025) in Cairo and Berlin, this essay converses with the images gathered in Blue-Black Liver and will later appear as a standalone publication.
Criticism & Academic Writing