Ramallah/New York was shot in 2004 and is informed by my experience of living in between Ramallah and New York for the last six years. The video, a kind of experimental documentary, interweaves travel agencies, hairdressers, delis, shwarma shops,  and arghile bars, while recording the movements of people simultaneously going backward and forward in between both sites. It records the spaces in between war, exile and destruction, and preserves another history - the resistance of everyday life.  It is a record of local experience in both sites as well as public and daily exchange between both. It is a document of a specific time that begins with personal exchanges from daily life as opposed to the official representations and narratives of history, CNN or
al-Jazeera. It also records our travel documents and our movements, particularly via Amman as West Bankers. It examines both the safety and familiarity of interiors as well as their entrapment and claustrophobia. My homage to the transcendence of spaces beyond official or recognized borders or actual site.

This video is also a personal testimony to our steadfastness after witnessing first-hand in the spring of 2002, the Israeli assault on Ramallah which virtually destroyed the entire civil infrastructure. Israel destroyed the data of the government ministries, hospitals and clinics, the land registry office, the courts and banking system, art spaces, businesses, non-governmental organizations and research institutes which Israel called "the infrastructure of terror" . There were even cases in which the Israeli army spread their excrement and urine in offices and homes.

There was a massive exodus of Ramallah's population in 1967 due to the Israeli occupation of the West bank . Ramallah has continued to endure major blows including the socio-economic fallout of occupation, the expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait, and curfews, closures, sieges and bombings  by Israel during this current intifada. The people of Ramallah face an unstable situation as the trauma of war and occupation continues and the construction of the Apartheid Wall ne continues and the construction of the Apartheid Wall nears completion.

Ramallah has also experienced the formation of and consolidation of a large middle class post-Oslo which has transformed the society as well as create urban sprawl. In direct opposition to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Israel, has been the trajectory of the returnees. In the
West Bank, the majority of the post-1993 returnees are returning from the United States. Many of these Palestinians lost their residency rights while away and can only  come back by circumventing Israeli laws. These returnees often have foreign passports and enter with tourist visas or with family reunification papers. They are not
officially "repatriated".