Stone Upon Stone

Vera Tamari
Palestine 2003

“Stone upon stone is our house on top of the hill White in sunlit dawn and in the moonlight green And betwixt one night and another, We know nothing but waiting.”

– From July in the City, a collection of poems by Palestinian artist, novelist and poet, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, 1959

In these devastating times of deliberate, pitiless destruction of homes, history and peoples, I defiantly built an edifice of stone to celebrate the future. It is a shrine, a shelter, an obelisk for all those people and countries whose future has been brutally marred and who are denied the chance of generating personal and collective memories. For, as every stone touches another stone, so does memory–it is created by an ageless, unbreakable bond between the past, present and the future.The stones used are ancient Byzantine mosaic cubes collected from near an archeological site in Palestine. The mortar to fix the cubes together is an old Palestinian building recipe.