Origin: Palestine | Documentary | Director: RIWAQ (Centre for Architectural Conservation), Yara Sharif, Nasser Golzari | 7 minutes

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Secrets of a Digital Garden: 50 Villages – 50 Flowers

A future imaginary scenario set up in rural Palestine in the form of a garden with 50 flowers representing 50 Palestinian villages: Nothing is conventional in this garden. Not aware whether one is at the scale of the village, the city, or the room, the garden negotiates a new experience within the informal and the periphery that has been created as a result of a fragmented geography; a status of in-betweeness; in between the real and the imaginary, surface and bellow, absurdity and irony, physical and virtual.
The digital garden reclaims some of the 420 villages of today’s Palestine, but also marks and commemorates the 420 Palestinian villages that were razed in 1948. 50 slices of earth containing “digital” flowers have been brought to Berlin to narrate this absurd landscape. Capsules containing physical and digital DNA are trapped in each flower to capture and share the story of the 50 Villages project. It may eventually require DNA forensics to reveal the micro objects implanted within each flower. For Palestinians this will be awakened one day. QR codes offer an insight into RIWAQ’s digital archive.