Jordan Nassar, a Palestinian-American living in New York, employs embroidery in his cotton-on-canvas panels, often featuring images of terrains in the far distance. These environments are close but inaccessible, speaking to the "versions of Palestine that exist in the minds of the diaspora, who have never been there and can never go there... half-made of imagination; they are dreamlands and utopias that are colorful and fantastical." Nassar designs these abstracted landscapes using traditional tatreez motifs and then sends the canvases to Hebron, West Bank, to a group of female weavers to stitch the final work. This movement of production continues the traditional, matrilineal transmission of the embroidery practice in Palestine to the West.

EMILY JACIR

Emily Jacir's work, Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Which Were Destroyed, Depopulated, and Occupied by Israel in 1948, is a Red Cross refugee tent with the names of 418 villages embroidered by a group of over 140 volunteers. The people who collaborated to make the Memorial were bankers, lawyers, filmmakers, dentists, consultants, playwrights, artists, activists, teachers, etc. Most were Palestinians (some of whom came from the villages in question), some were Israelis (who grew up in the remains of these villages), and they were joined by people from a multitude of backgrounds. The presence of large-scale memorials is ingrained in public memory; their permanent existence is a constant reminder of tragic histories, as seen in the U.S (9/11, Oklahoma City). However, in Palestine, there are no memorials in memory of the events of 1948. The lack of memorials on those sites is "a manifestation of the inability to combat the 'official history,' a history that doesn't acknowledge the people of Palestine prior to the creation of Israel." Thus, Jacir's work attempts to memorialize the forgotten Palestinian villages, for the memory of their former residents and for future generations to remember.