Canada Park
Music by Nabiha Iqbal; animation by Ali Kays, 8 min 4 s, 2020
AlSalah walks on snow to fall into the desert. She finds herself on unceded indigenous territory in so-called “Canada,” an exile unable to return to Palestine. She trespasses the colonial border as a digital spectre floating through Ayalon-Canada Park, transplanted over three Palestinian villages razed by the Israeli occupation in 1967.
Canada Park is an experimental video poem exploring the politics of dis/appearance of Palestine as narrativized, mapped and imaged in Google Streetview and in early 20th-century colonial landscape photography of the “Holy Land,” namely at the site of the village of Imwas which is theologically conflated with Emmaus, a village cited in the Bible. This work is a response to Tomb’s title, Pine Valley, alluding to the beautiful indigenous tree that many in the Levant are attached to, but has been weaponized by the colonizer to greenwash ethnic cleansing.
Imwas is erased and Emmaus marks a religious tourist site in the park: located between what is commonly known as “No Man’s Land” and Jerusalem. The film explores this absurd space of suspension to create a counter mythology of this place against the religious, geopolitical and capitalist forces that actuated their imaginings on Palestine. Alsalah reinserts the few images documenting the March of Return to the destroyed villages of Latroun which took place on June 16, 2007 as a means of opposition. Imwas is not erased. It is buried underground, an undercommons, an elsewhere, where colonialism no longer makes sense.
AlSalah wakes up again, feet on the ground in so-called “Canada;” another park, Iroquois Mohawk territory. She walks on snow to fall into the desert.
Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal. Her films work with the material aesthetics of disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives and histories in colonial image worlds. Her moving images are both ghostly trespasses and seeping ruptures of the colonial image, that function as another border, another wall. She thinks of her creative process as a collective recollection in a circle of relations with one other– and the unknown.
Her award-winning films have screened at Cinema Days Palestine, Montreal International Documentary Festival, Singapore, Yebisu, Valdivia, Melbourne, Glasgow and Beirut International, Prismatic Ground, Blackstar, doc Lisboa, FID Marseille, Open City Docs, and Instants Video, among others.