The Missing Layer

The site is a depopulated and destructed multilayered Palestinian village that holds a diverse historical legacy of many civilizations. The village was the largest Palestinian village in galilee until it was invaded in the 16th July Israeli forces along with the rest of the Lower Galilee in Operation Dekel. Villagers were depopulated and became refugees, later on, the Jewish National Fund has planted a forest on the village ruins as a policy that Israel tends to apply on destructed villages. Those forests are used as a colonial tool that its main purpose is to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, serve the myth of “Blooming the desert”, Greenwashing and cover war crimes.

The Project Aims to create a memorial park that transforms the natural landscape into a display and evidence, creating new connections between the space and time, where the main role goes to the site, and relies on the experience in order to create new understanding of history and fix the narrative of the space; by adding THE MISSING LAYER of the narrative; the Palestinian presence.

The main project statement was adding a circle in the middle of the site creating a trail and all trees inside the circle were moved out as a bold and poetic statement that refuses and objects, revealing all the truth inside that circle, the journey has multiple landscape, artistic and architectural features that complete and enhance the experience

The project consists of different landscape, artistic and architectural features that help to create the journey. It has both an open-air museum and an underground museum. The journey starts in the visitor center that links to the ring trail that works as a platform, goes through a series of follies that narrate historical periods of the remains, the trail ends up carving the ground creating the underground museum that narrates the Palestinian “Missing Layer”, in a set of different spaces that change according to the phase it stresses, Home. Nakba 1948, Exile, Road to Palestine and Return. The ability of playing with light underground easily made it the concept for designing those spaces, where “Light is Home”. The journey ends by existing and freely walking through the columns memorial that are planted in the center of each former house.