By Anamaria Pravicencu and Manja Ristiฤ
In the shade of Palestinian gardens, memory once bloomed — fragrant with olive groves and the quiet gestures of care. These were spaces of closeness, of which Christiane Dabdoub Nasser recalls inviting us into her childhood and Palestinian culture from another time, where the Mediterranean breathed through shared rituals of tending and living in harmony with the land. Rooted in practices of cultivation, refuge, and sensory proximity, such intimacy has been systematically disrupted by the colonial project of the Israeli state, which reconfigured land into instruments of control and dispossession. Today, the relational fabric of Palestinian landscapes lies fractured — yet the soil remembers.
Through powerful storytelling, family history, and enduring friendship, this piece gathers what remains: the rustle of leaves under siege, the echo of footsteps in forbidden groves, the persistence of tenderness in a terrain marked by erasure. It traces how ecological and cultural memory endure despite spatial fragmentation and political violence.
Manja Ristiฤ engages with sounds gathered from war-torn landscapes and towns across the former Yugoslavia, from WWII memorial sites to intoxicated rivers — bearing witness to how the land carries its wounds in silence, while the echoes of war still tremble through every pore of the heart.
Concept and direction: Anamaria Pravicencu
Storytelling by Christiane Dabdoub Nasser, with the support of Maya Nasser
Sound design and composition: Manja Ristiฤ
Presentation text: Manja Ristiฤ
Mixing: La Plant Studio, Belgrade
A production of SEMI SILENT and tranzit.ro, Bucharest
The first version was presented in the frame of To Give a House the Form of an Event, a program by Tranzit at the Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, Silistea Snagovului, Romania, June 2025.
The present form, with the contribution of Manja Ristiฤ, premiered at the Orizont Sonor festival, in the Botanical Garden of Bucharest, September 2025.