Concept

General Introduction — How This Project Began

When I started Fab Academy I knew my purpose was to explore the full potential of digital fabrication — not as a technical exercise, but as a means toward something I had long imagined but never had the skills to make. I set out a set of principles for myself from the beginning: process-led design, research-driven making, kinetic form, and a deep interest in the intersection of digital fabrication and traditional craft. The final project had to be something that would push all of those principles at once.

Working in the cultural space in Palestine, I have spent years carrying ideas for art installations and sculptures that lived only in my head — held there by a lack of technical ablity on my part.

The Motivation

The project draws from a specific and personal experience of loss. Due to Israeli colonial policy, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have been systematically severed from each other. Beginning in the early 2000s, the construction of the separation wall enclosed Gaza and fragmented Palestinian movement across the land. Communities with deep historical, cultural, and economic ties to one another and to the coast were forcibly disconnected. An entire generation grew up in an increasingly enclosed and suffocated world.

This transition happened during my childhood. I have clear memories of my parents taking us to the coast — the sea was where we spent our summers. Then, in the early 2000s, more than four million Palestinians were forbidden from the sea. Movement became fragmented, suffocated, surveilled. I grew up in Ramallah watching the sea from the hills — visible on the horizon, permanently out of reach. That view of the distant sea became a collective symbol: a site of loss, but also of aspiration. The horizon of a free Palestine where people can move freely…

The Concept This sculpture takes that condition as its starting point. It is imagined as a kinetic object that carries the mood of a distant sea — one that moves, breathes, and responds. In its full realisation, it would travel between viewpoints, its motion driven by the wireless transmission of wave sounds: the rhythm of the sea translated into physical movement, present in a place where the sea itself cannot be reached.

But the project holds more than one meaning. Being in Barcelona — on the other end of the same Mediterranean — brought a second layer into focus. The same sea that is a site of loss and longing for Palestinians is a site of leisure and celebration for others. This raised a question I couldn’t let go of: how can such radically different experiences of time coexist across the same body of water? In some places time moves as a procession of new beginnings — holidays, birthdays, futures being built. In places of war and genocide, time is suspended. There is no procession. There is only survival, anticipated loss, and a denail of any meanful future…

Misalignments of Time is an attempt to hold that contradiction in a single object. Not as a statement, but as an experience — a device that opens a space for multiple meanings rather than closing around one. This is the imperfect first attempt.