We chose to organize a residency program in one of the most ancient cities in the world, a lush oasis located far below the level of the sea, which seemed a fitting place to invite contemporary creation and new visions.
el-Atlal invited SCALES, architects and designers, to prototype the first module of the envisioned residency in Jericho. Stone Matters, the inaugural experimentation lab based on an innovative construction principle, was aimed to provide insights for the el-Atlal residency building's construction. The prototype was successfully erected in Jericho. It's part of a series of eleven structures utilizing local stone and pushing the boundaries of traditional building techniques.
Stone Matters, 2016. Photos by Mikaela BurstowZuri Camille de Souza started a long-term project while in residency at el-Atlal where she studied the relationship between the body, ecology, and biopolitics in the context of Jericho and Palestine. She researched the use of plants in the everyday, while talking and experimenting with initiatives and individuals. She studied cooking, local methods and popular resistance and wrote Distant Nature, a political herbarium of Jericho. During the open studio, she invited her visitors to engage with and learn to use the ingredients most readily found in Jericho to create various useful creams, lotions and other remedies.
Zuri Camille de Souza, 2017. Photo by Rebecca Topakian
I co-founded el-Atlal in 2015, an artists’ and writers’ residency in Jericho, Palestine. We chose to organize a residency program in one of the most ancient cities in the world, a lush oasis located far below the level of the sea, which seemed a fitting place to invite contemporary creation and new visions. Despite limited resources and the absence of a permanent space, we initiated an annual open call for three to four artists to spend one month in Jericho during the fall. We worked with resident artists to elaborate new images of a vibrant Palestine.
Over six years, we organized three residency editions, in 2016, 2017, and 2019, and one edition in 2015 in Amman. We reflected on the cultures of the oasis; food and craft practices, built heritage, oral histories inspired the work of the artists in residence, and found resonance with the local communities that they met and worked with. We facilitated bold and ambitious work with twelve invited artists who participated in the program at Auberg-Inn, our temporary home—a two-story family house built in the sixties at the base of the Mount of Temptation.
During each residency, we organized an open studio where the artists presented their work in progress to the community, and spoke about their practice, or organized dinners and gatherings. These moments were crucial for the artists to engage in conversations with an audience interested in renewed and bold images of Palestine.
In parallel, we dreamed of building a permanent space for the residency. We commissioned the Bethlehem-based studio AAU ANASTAS to develop the architectural proposal for the residency, which was based on stone vaults, following their extensive research on stone. They subsequently constructed a prototype of the residency in Jericho as an installation for the public to utilize and engage with.
Sascha Brylla, 2019. Photo by el-AtlalSascha Brylla was able to conduct his research over the course of the residency and to engage with various actors of the local communities in order to create his work based around the use of traditional Palestinian embroidery. For Sascha, this time-consuming technique contradicts our zeitgeist - constant productivity and speed. By implementing his conceptual work on a piece of fabric, he hoped to explore a different relationship to time. He continued to embroider during the open studio, in an effort to share something of this exploration. He experimented with different patterns, fonts and designs that are related to the oasis city of Jericho. This work is a tribute not only the great oasis city, its rich history, its inhabitants, but also to the magical potential of the everyday.
Eric Stephany, 2016. Photos by Rebecca TopakianEric Stephany worked on the archeological site of Tell es-Sultan, where the remains of the ancient city of Jericho are located. Among the ruins, he was especially interested in a buried tower which was used as a sundial. Having obtained an authorization from the Ministry of Tourism and Archeology, Eric Stephany was the first person to penetrate the tower in more than twenty years. He strove to investigate the relationship between the inhabitants of ancient Jericho to their sky. This project is inscribed within a more general work on the apparatuses of rising, which he explored in Germany, in India, and elsewhere. For him, his residency project, Awwwe was the opportunity to experiment with innovative media all the while working on a major yet little known archeological site.
Cyril Zarcone, 2017. Photos by Rebecca Topakian
Cyril engaged with mudbrick, applying it to forms he encountered in Qasr Hicham in Jericho during his residency as a reflection on ancient building know-how and how people related to it.