Jerusalem — Take II | By Jack Persekian

Jerusalem’s landscape is a palimpsest of competing ideologies, where each layer of stone and soil bears witness to the violence of curation. The project reveals that preservation is never neutral but an act of power, privileging certain histories while silencing others. Through visual archaeology as counter-mapping, it challenges the colonial gaze, resurrecting absences and rejecting nostalgia that freezes Jerusalem in a mythical past. Its sanctity lies in the enduring sumud (steadfastness) of its people, whose roots, like those of uprooted olive trees, persist beneath the asphalt, waiting to break through.