Fieldnotes
In this section you find notes, sketches, and fragments of conversations – you will be directed to the archive to read further
FISHING FOR A PLACE ELSEWHERE
Denmark, June 2026
A small fishing boat off the southern Danish coast, where the Midsummer evening sun hangs just three handbreadths above the horizon, yet already casts a sharp light across the surface of the water. Jacob Aue Sobol wanted to get away from the old men at the harbor, who were forever lecturing him about fishing. The village community had lit the bonfire for the St. Hans festival, with a small witch effigy perched atop the stacked logs – people say that, in the past, women were burned on this day. The island's residents sat around the fire singing pre-Christian religious songs.
Jacob takes me out into the bay – and into a world of memory that fills this small boat and the meager fishing grounds of the Baltic Sea with images from another time and another place.
I was twenty-three when I was accepted into a photography school that was very competitive. Yet I gave up my plans to study and went to Greenland instead, where I worked with a hunter and fisherman. My father was furious because I hadn't gone to university: 'How are you going to provide for yourself without a degree?' But that was precisely what I was doing there – providing for myself. In the end, every single day in that village revolved around exactly that: providing for yourself and for others.
Jacob fell in love with a young woman named Sabine and joined James in fishing, hunting seals and, from time to time, polar bears across Greenland's endless rocky expanses. They pitched their tents beside watering holes, where they waited hour after hour, shielding their eyes from the blinding light reflected a thousandfold by the snow and ice.
The houses in the village were cramped; ten or fifteen people might share a single room, their bodies pressed against one another, especially during the long winters. An ashtray on the windowsill, a picture of the Last Supper on the wall, two sofas facing an old television. On the floor, the animals they had caught were butchered, their blood spreading into broad pools.
Village life was hard, Jacob says. Alcohol - lots of alcohol – led to violence and excess, to open secrets: shootings, child abuse, fights. Partners cheated on one another when they were drunk.
Those two years in Tiniteqilaaq became deeply etched into Jacob's memory, and the photographs he made there between 1999 and 2002 seem equally engraved. They would later make him known far beyond Scandinavia. Stark contrasts dominate the images: the white of the icy landscape, almost a nothingness on the paper, interrupted by sharp dark rocks pushing upward, dissolving into blurred horizons in the distance. Within this landscape flicker the black and gray of human bodies: the lined, solemn face of the old hunter James; the intertwined bodies of children wrestling in the cramped living room; the opened carcass of a seal, its entrails spilling out as blood covers the floor. Between these scenes appears the melancholic smile of Sabine, the woman he loved, often photographed naked, yet never fragile in her nakedness.
One of his books revolves around James – the hunter – the frozen landscape, and family life inside his house. The other centers on Sabine and Jacob's love for her. The first book concludes with a letter to his former teacher, in which Jacob writes that he now has a family of his own to provide for. He draws connections between life in Greenland nearly twenty-five years ago and his own life today.
He now lives on a small island in southern Denmark with his wife and two children (a third will soon be born). He owns a small boat that he often takes out fishing. He misses James.
It's not easy having children, Jacob says as we head back toward the harbor. Fishing is also a way of taking a break from the noise of daily struggles. But it remains a means of providing for himself and his family: the freezer is full of fish, and when we arrive he fries several of them for us in a pan.
The images of hunting and loving in the black, narrow houses along Greenland's white coast continue to reach into the present. To this day, Jacob and his wife Sara keep returning to this material, rearranging and reworking it into new book drafts. The years spent with the Inuit community are not merely a memory or a formative life experience; they have also become a source of work and income over decades. In this way, photography itself - another form of hunting – became a means of sustenance.
At the same time, these memories and their images create an imaginary horizon against which life on the island assumes its particular shape. They are the engine that makes it materially possible, but they also constitute the imaginative frame beyond it – a line of flight.
That line of flight manifests itself in fishing, in the tracks the small boat leaves across the water as it follows the shifting seasonal fish stocks. Yet the Baltic Sea is becoming increasingly depleted. Fertilizer runoff pours into the water, and many species of fish have become difficult to find.
Jacob and Sara continue to print and bind the photographs from those years. They have developed an extensive cycle, Twelve Months of Winter, in which further work from Jacob's earlier life appears. All of these photographs were made before the family settled into their small house on the island.
This Winter is eternal because, as a horizon of the imaginary, it reaches into every aspect of the present, thereby sustaining and nourishing it.
Notes on Healing in Times of Destruction
Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, spring 2026
War is raging in Western Asia and beyond. Bombings and large-scale displacement are among the most visible forms of destruction, but devastation extends to all aspects of daily life.
The following sections offer glimpses of how life continues in spite of everything. As a space for reflection on three months spent between Egypt and the Levant during the US-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon in spring 2026, I am following the traces of the question:
How does healing emerge in a situation of violent destruction and pervasive anxiety?
I seek to understand how people inhabit continuity with violence, exploring healing not as resolution but as an everyday practice. This practice involves living with the fear and wounds of the past while protecting others and making oneself intelligible within a vulnerable social world.
At this moment of violent escalation and equally violent ceasefires, healing and repair seem to be out of reach. However, I draw inspiration from Veena Das' work by seeking traces of the ordinary amidst destruction. By paying attention to a wide range of imaginative practices, I gather ways in which healing is sought, enacted, or theorised in the everyday lives of my interlocutors.
For many years, I have lived and worked under the shadow of violence. In contrast to many of my friends, I have been spared the worst. West Asia and North Africa, site of European colonial projects for more than a century, are in a permanent state of exception: wars are not followed by peace, but rather by the shifting of violence into other dimensions. Here, violence “attaches itself with its tentacles into everyday life and folds itself into the recesses of the ordinary”, as Veena Das puts it. This state of exception is the space in which daily life takes place. Violence remains present, but also, in this very space, the power of restitution emerges.
I collects traces, moments, and reflections from my encounters with people who seek, and reflect about, healing. Healing, as a line of flight in the Deleuzian sense, a path that can transform imagination into a movement away from a quagmire of stagnation. The healing of the human body from diseases and injuries – the archetype of regeneration – is mirrored in practices of the interpersonal, the political, in creative production, as well as in thinking and feeling. The tiqqun, the healing of the world, is present in every gesture that seeks to transform injury, grief, anger and hopelessness in the face of what has happened into something new. By collecting thoughts and practices of healing, I am archiving fragments of a future that is already unfolding, and which is constantly hidden within "the endlessly growing mountain of ruins" (Benjamin) that the past has become.
Reverberations of War
Cairo, March 2026
Under a tree in Cairo’s Garden City, not far from the Nile, I look at a stray dog lying on the roof of a Korean-made car. Garden City was once home to pashas, industrial magnates, and colonial rulers, but today most of the villas stand empty and paint peels from the French shutters. Streets run in long curves that almost lead back to the direction they came from if one follows them long enough. This is no coincidence: the neighborhood was intentionally designed to be impractical, so that it could not be used as a shortcut between hectic Tahrir Square — where the 2011 revolution began — and the bustling district of Sayeda Zeinab.
Today, however, there are hardly any cars on the streets anyway. An unusual silence hangs in the air, because these are the days of Eid celebrations marking the breaking of the fast, four in total (the government has announced that this year the holiday should be celebrated twice as long). No honking, no vendors pulling their wooden carts through the streets and calling out to people from below. No wealthy parents driving their children to school in SUVs. Instead, rain pours down in torrents.
Water drips from the dog’s gray-brown fur onto the roof of the car, where it mixes with the thick layer of dust that quite literally covers and permeates everything in Cairo. I watch this viscous mixture running down the Korean vehicle, which appears to have been abandoned there for years, merging with a dirty stream flowing down the street, dragging all kinds of garbage along with it and washing ankle-high around those who dared venture outside.
A bawāb sits in an old armchair in front of a building entrance, like so many other bawābs in the neighborhood and throughout Cairo. He has a tiny apartment on the ground floor, guards the entrance, and watches those who come and go. Ahmad comes from a small village nearly a thousand kilometers south of Cairo along the Nile. Sheltered from the weather, we sit in the doorway watching the water flow downhill through the street. Ahmad talks about the war.
The United States and Israel are bombing all of Iran, large parts of Lebanon, and many places in Iraq. Iran and its allies, meanwhile, are showering the Gulf states and Israel with missile and drone attacks. In Egypt, by contrast, things are quiet. The government stands politically with the "West" and ideologically with the "Muslims", like most countries in the region. The result is a tense silence that even the rain cannot wash away. In the city’s tourist districts, Palestinian keffiyehs are sold alongside golden models of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, from which the Prophet Muhammad is said to have begun his journey through several heavenly dimensions, but hardly anyone speaks openly about what is happening throughout the holy lands now.
We sit silently beside each other for some time, interrupted only by several boys delivering food on scooters and struggling with the fact that there are no addresses. More precisely, every building has three different addresses. Then Ahmad says:
This rain isn’t normal. The whole winter was dry, and now everything comes at once. People here say the rain comes from the war. Could be true, no? So many bombs, they’re bombing everything — maybe that affects the weather.
We continue watching the street, where the soaked stray dog finally climbs wearily down from the roof of the car and trots off down the road.
From Cairo to Saydnaya
Damascus, Syria, May 2026
As Beirut was once again bombed by Israel in March 2026, I decided to spend some time in Egypt. In Cairo and Alexandria, I met with a number of artists and also visited the desert Oasis Siwa. Along the way, I spoke to people about possible paths towards healing. In April, I reached Jordan by boat, continued from there to Damascus and then to the small town of Saydnaya north of the Syrian capital. Saydnaya is famous for being home to a Greek-Orthodox monastery that has been a major pilgrimage site since the Middle Ages. An icon, allegedly painted by Saint Luke and depicting the Virgin Mary with the Child, is said to be hidden in the wall of a cave-like series of rooms next to the monastery's church. At the same time, Saydnaya is known throughout Syria and beyond for one of the most brutal prisons of the Assad regime that was toppled in December 2024. I spent a month there to understand local Christians anxieties – many of them had been close to the old regime – and the monastery's powers of healing and protection.
My work here is a first step towards a long-term research project about practices and imaginaries of healing in post-Assad Syria.
WHO HEALS THE DEER AFTER THE HUNT?
Egypt, Jordan, Syria, spring 2026
Alexandria, Egypt
Hanan Ramadan sits in her studio in al-Hadhra al-Gedida, a noisy, densely packed neighborhood of Alexandria, and tells the story of a deer that appeared to her in a dream. In front of her are four different dishes, which she has cooked for us according to her mother’s precise instructions. The neighbour, on her balcony just a hop away from Hanan’s living room window, hangs laundry and looks in at us. Here, the artist is surrounded by young women, painted on large canvases leaning against the walls. The women hold their own bodies, often naked, and many of them appear to be in pain.
Hanan met many of these women as she moved repeatedly around Alexandria. Eventually, it became a strategy: she wanted to get to know them better, to feel and understand their stories, and in doing so, understand her own story. The twelve young women she encountered during that time are still present in her paintings today.
A recurring dream: she runs, fast. In doing so, she imitates a dream animal in its flight – a creature whose hind and front legs cross over each other in gallop, stretched out like an arrow, barely touching the ground. Only years later did Hanan learn that the animal whose movement she had traced in her dream was a deer. The dream had created a physical connection between herself – a woman hailing from the Sinai Peninsula – and the deer.
She also learned that there are people who hunt and kill deer simply for fun. This form of violence, she notes, resembles the pain inflicted by men on women: they do it just for enjoyment. Many of the young women, she says, carry wounds from their wedding night – wounds caused by their own husbands, simply for pleasure, because those wounds are meant to confirm their purity to the entire family.
Looking at one of her paintings, a man once told her: perhaps you should cover these women’s breasts with feathers? Otherwise, no one will buy the painting.
With feathers!, she said. Where are the feathers supposed to come from? The girl is running with a deer! The deer, wounded and bleeding, often lies in the arms of the women Hanan paints. It reflects their pain, merges with them, and they find themselves in one another.
Who heals the deer when the hunt is over?, Hanan asks. And she answers: only the deer itself.
In later paintings, her relationship with the subject transforms. Movement appears; the deer and the woman have found a path to healing – they run. Another friend from southern Egypt once told me: running is something women in Egypt often dream of, because an almost invisible force forbids them from moving in public in any way other than slowly and unobtrusively. Rapid movement of the body is, in itself, a movement towards freedom.
On a ship crossing the the Red Sea from Egypt to Jordan
Around us sit Saudis, white and red-and-white checked ghutras on their heads. They speak quickly and melodiously, like a flock of birds gathering on a tree in spring. The mustached man sitting next to us begins to sing a sad Bedouin song. Long locks of hair fall almost to his shoulder. In a moment of silence, he turns to me: Very nice backpack!, he says, pointing at my luggage. I need something like that out there. We travel in the desert for days and sleep outside. All on foot.
He pulls out his phone and shows us pictures of gazelles, their bodies cut open and hanging from trees. The men are hunters returning from a desert expedition in the Sinai, where they had apparently killed many animals. In Saudi Arabia, this is forbidden, he adds. That’s why he has a house and a wife in Dahab, from where he can pursue his hobby without disturbance.
Saydnaya, Qalamoun Mountains, Syria
In Saydnaya, the story is told like this: In the year 547 CE, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian came to this mountainous region north of Damascus. We do not know why – perhaps he was campaigning against the Persian Sassanids. The emperor went, as is certain, hunting at the very rocks where the monastery now stands. He saw a gazelle and drew his bow. The gazelle turned its head and looked at him. The gazelle spoke: No, you shall not kill me, but build a church on this rock.
Then Justinian realised that in the form of the gazelle, the Virgin Mary stood before him. He made preparations for the construction, and the Virgin appeared to him once more to explain exactly how the building should be carried out on this difficult terrain.
The Virgin Loves Silver Arms, Legs, and Hearts
Damascus, May 2026
In Ḥārat al-Yahūd, the old Jewish quarter of Damascus, narrow alleyways wind between crumbling façades of mud and timber houses, behind which, after many years of war, life obviously continues: shaded courtyards overgrown with trees open up behind low entrances, where children play and elderly women sit together. In one of these alleys, Abu Ilyas owns a tiny workshop where he makes and sells his silver jewellery. Every day (except Sunday, when he goes to church and afterwards sits on the sofa at home), he can be seen right behind the glassless window, beside which a small display case contains ten or twelve pieces that, in their simplicity, speak both of traditional craftsmanship and of Abu Ilyas’ modest life. Few customers are likely to wander in here; anyone looking for jewellery will find dozens of shops in one section of the high, covered sūqs in the centre of Damascus' Old City. Abu Ilyas sits behind his window as though he had not seen time pass outside in the alley, as though he had missed the decline of the neighbourhood and the departure of all the Jews and many of the Christians who once lived there. He is delighted to see us and invites us to spend a little time sitting with him in his shop, looking out onto the alley.
Abu Ilyas has visited the monastery of Saydnaya often, though this was many years ago, when he was a young man. He asks us to bring him, on our next visit, a small wad of cotton soaked in the holy oil from the Shaghūra, the holy image of Mary and her son. These little gifts, filled with the blessing power of baraka and packaged in plastic bags, are prepared by a nun who attends the hidden icon and prays for the pilgrims. To the right and left of the recess concealed within the wall, where the painting is said to be kept, and before which visitors kneel one after another in prayer for several minutes, gold and silver figures line the wall – arms, legs, and hearts, but also entire bodies of adults and children. These body parts and figures bear witness to experiences of healing attributed to the Virgin; in gratitude, pilgrims have commissioned them and presented them to the monastery. At times, they also expressed a hope for healing or for a child (although such conditional offerings are regarded with mixed feelings). In every case, these are nudhūr (sing. nidhr) – vows that led pilgrims to bring such crafted objects to the monastery as votive offerings. Abu Ilyas was once one of the Damascene silversmiths who produced such ex-votos for those who had been healed (and sometimes also for those seeking healing). This, as well, was a long time ago. Unfortunately, someone once borrowed the small chisels with which he engraved the silver plaques, and never brought them back; besides, hardly anyone asks for silver body parts anymore today.
Many miracles have taken place at the Monastery of Our Lady of Saydnaya. Once, in the midst of the war – Abu Ilyas recalls after some reflection – a man brought an enormous candle into the Shaghūra. There was nothing unusual about such a gift in a place illuminated only by candles, nor indeed about offering candles to churches and mosques across the region more generally. The candle was put in place, and the nuns tried to light it. They tried many times, but the wick would not catch. Eventually they grew suspicious and called someone to examine the candle. It turned out that it was entirely filled with explosives and that, therefore, only a miracle had prevented it from destroying large parts of the the monastery with everyone who happened to be present.
The story reflects a long history of anxiety, at times paranoia, concerning Muslim attempts to destroy the miraculous icon of Saydnaya, as its veneration was often seen as a heretical practice. In the 14th century, Ibn Taymiyya himself reportedly attempted to have the icon vandalised. In this instance, however, the collective memory is not supported by the monastery's written tradition: in response to our enquiry, Sister Lukiya checked the relevant records and declared that no such explosive candle has ever been brought as a gift.
Another attack on the monastery, not entirely dissimilar, had, however, definitely taken place: a rocket had struck the roof, hitting a small apartment where a Lebanese family had stayed only the previous day. The rocket had remained lodged in the roof without exploding – this, too, being perceived as a miracle. Even more astonishingly, the rocket was soon "wrapped in the Virgin's mantle" and disappeared without a trace. The nuns made it clear that the rocket had been fired by the Syrian army – the very army that presented itself as the protector of Christians against Muslim extremists – and not by the rebels.
The monastery, which the nuns understand as the living body of the Virgin, miraculously neutralises attempts at violent intrusion in these richly figurative narratives. It is these memories of the monastery's inviolability, which for decades stood under the special protection of the Assad regime, that Abu Ilyas recounts, looking out of the window onto the empty alleyway.
The Bab al-Saghir graveyard next to Damascus' old Jewish quarter
The atelier of the artist Mustafa Ali, in a traditional Damascene mansion close to Abu Ilyas' workshop
A Return of Eyesight
Cairo, April 2026
Mohamed Taman works in his “colour laboratory,” located in a former wheelchair factory in Cairo’s Sayeda Zeinab district. Here, he experiments with chemical reactions that produce specific colour effects, the formulas for which he keeps secret. Since taking part in the 2011 revolution and the protests against El-Sisi’s rise to power in 2013, he has scarcely been allowed to exhibit his work. During the street battles of that time, he was struck by a bullet that remains lodged between his eye and his brain to this day – however, his eye miraculously regenerated itself.
Mohamed guided us not only through his studio, where we were able to observe the transformations in his research into chemical colour reactions, but also through the neighbourhood in which he works, as well as the gallery scene on the Nile island of Zamalek.
"Who heals the deer when the hunt is over?" A Conversation With Hanan Ramadan
Alexandria, March 2026
Hanan Ramadan is an artist who grew up in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. In her studio in Alexandria, she paints the women she has encountered since arriving in the city, depicting the injuries they carry with them. Through a complex symbolic language and techniques she has developed herself, she also points toward paths of healing. Facing significant resistance within the Egyptian art scene, she repeatedly portrays vulnerability and strength in nude bodies. The figure of the deer, originating from a dream, not only serves as a metaphor for trauma and resistance, but also becomes a physical companion to these women.
Silence, Healing, and the Valorization of the Other
Siwa, April 2026
Siwa is known as a place of healing. A particular type of tourism has a firm grip on the desert oasis in western Egypt: people come from all over the world in search of spirituality, authenticity, and tranquility. The place also has a strongly exotic character for Egyptians: YouTubers, hippies, and the educated middle class paint a picture of an alternative world where one can escape the stress of contemporary urban life. Of course, this image overlooks a large part of the local reality. The touristification of Siwa leads to displacement and creates a phantasmagorical parallel world.
Sinai and the Israelis
Sinai, April 2026
The Sinai Peninsula’s eastern coast, between the towns of Nuweiba and Taba, is dotted with beach camps that are famous throughout Egypt and among backpackers around the world. Contrary to the mass tourism of Sharm El Sheikh and the somewhat more sophisticated hotels in Dahab, these camps are said to offer only the basics, allowing visitors to focus fully on snorkeling and sunbathing.
We spent a night in one of these camps and had a long conversation with one of its owners, who explained to us that this form of tourism was originally created for Israeli hippies in the 1970s. Today, 90% of their visitors come from Israel, some of them ultra-orthodox Haredim. The gatherings that take place here offer rare chances of reconciliation, she claims. The local Bedouin population, often speaking Hebrew, has long adapted to Israeli tourists and regularly challenges business initiatives by outsiders such as our host’s.
"Hundertwasser came naked to the studio, I didn't like him"
Cairo, April 2026
Mohamed Abla has been a well-known artist in Egypt for decades. He invited us to his studio in downtown Cairo, where we had a long conversation about his artistic journey. Abla has also worked as an art therapist in Zürich, and through his stories he described some of the healing potential he believes is inherent in art.
Alexandria
Alexandria, April 2026
Some impressions from Alexandria
The Last Day of Ramadan
Cairo, March 2026
On the last evening of Ramadan, a small restaurant in Downtown Cairo served free food to everyone passing by
The City of the Dead
In recent years, the "City of the Dead" in Cairo has been cut open by large-scale construction projects destroying many funerary and residential buildings. Here, the magnificient shrine of Imam Shafi'i is located, who was one of the founders of the four Sunni Islamic schools of law.
