Fragmented architecture

I found on Biblio a book of photography by Jenny Okun called Dreamscapes (2012). I’d never heard of Okun, but for $1? It arrived today, and I love her work. Her style has evolved from double exposures on film to reconstructed images created with Photoshop (usually 6 images). Perhaps this is the year I will learn to use Photoshop, inspired by the beauty of her abstract creations. 

As I was looking at her fragmented architectural images, I thought of the architecture of Gaza: fragmented, flattened, demolished. We know the approximate number of people: 30,000 people, 10,000 of them children. But we seldom hear of the buildings. Universities, libraries (all the books), hospitals, houses, mosques, apartments. I searched for Gaza Architecture. I found a woman engineer in Gaza, Haya Barzaq. In 2022 she was busy photographing the historic buildings, building an archive “Before it is too late.” 

Now it is too late. She hasn’t posted anything in her Instagram account since 2022. Poignantly, someone called “Muhammed Ali” commented on her last post, “Are you still alive?” Instagram has hidden that comment, but you can ask to see it anyway. The question remains unanswered. She made only 53 posts, but she had over four thousand followers. 

I have created this post as an homage to Jenny Okun and Haya Barzaq. And this poem:

During a Genocide 

By Yahia Lababidi 

You will find that during a genocide
most words lose their meaning
Some sound empty & others strange
Apart from unceasing prayer,
eloquence takes the form
of tears or kindness and solidarity
Even a quiet moan or sighing
is preferable to false words or worse:
a loud and wounding Silence…