who am i to love you?
Liyan Ibrahim
Advisor: Tiri Kananuruk
who am i to love you? is an interactive installation that explores the entangled relationship between memory, loss, and the archive in the context of Palestine. Using projection mapping, shadow forms, and textual fragments—including poetry, testimonies, and personal reflections—the work questions who gets to preserve history and how trauma is witnessed, inherited, and reimagined.
Project Description
who am i to love you? is an interactive installation that explores survivor’s guilt, the politics of memory, and the instability of historical narratives through the lens of the Palestinian experience. Drawing from personal testimony, poetry, and collected fragments from people in Palestine and its diaspora, the work reimagines the archive not as a static repository of truth, but as a living, emotional terrain—one shaped by absence, grief, distortion, and resistance.
The installation uses projection mapping to layer shadow-like figures and ephemeral animations onto printed text. As viewers move through the space, they encounter glimpses of stories that are incomplete, interrupted, or disfigured—reflecting how memory operates under trauma and occupation. The texts—partially legible, partially withheld—gesture toward what it means to be a witness when the violence is ongoing, and the evidence is contested or deliberately erased.
Rather than document “truth,” who am i to love you? asks what it means to remember when the world insists on forgetting. It questions how one bears witness ethically, across time, distance, and generational loss—and whether love, too, can be a form of archival practice. In doing so, it resists traditional archival logic and proposes a new kind of counter-archive: one that is felt, embodied, and always in motion.
Technical Details
Projection mapping using MadMapper and videos are timed to play in a certain order/sequence.
The audience will interact with the project using a flashlight in order to read the archives
Research/Context
This project is rooted in the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation—a cause that is historically dense, emotionally complex, and constantly evolving across borders and generations. The context of who am i to love you? is shaped by an understanding that for many Palestinians, especially those in the diaspora, history is not only inherited but also incomplete, fragmented, and contested. This tension is central to the work’s exploration of memory, survivor’s guilt, and the act of witnessing.
The project draws on archival practices that resist institutional narratives, instead embracing poetic and affective forms of preservation. Influences include the writings of Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani, whose work archives Palestinian subjectivity through lyricism, resistance, and political imagination. The book Subjectivity Atlas of Palestine also informs the research, offering a nonlinear, map-like approach to Palestinian identity, memory, and space.
The use of projected shadow figures echoes images of resistance like the iconic Girl with a Balloon stencil on the West Bank wall. These silhouettes become metaphors for lives lived in partial visibility—figures caught between presence and erasure.
In rejecting traditional archival logic, this project turns to poetry, personal testimony, and ghost-like visual gestures to ask: What does it mean to document trauma that never fully ends? And what possibilities emerge when memory becomes the archive?