Digital and Data Humanities Summer Fellowships Cohort Archive

Specters of Home

Specters of Home is an interactive installation about haunting, exile, and colonialism. Made in collaboration with Palestinian dancers and choreographers, the project brings together virtual reality, architecture, and dance to explore the ways in which the political exclusion of Palestinians from the State of Israel haunts contemporary Israeli and Jewish-American culture. As viewers enter the installation space, they will find themselves immersed in a lush and ghostly 3D projection of the architectural ruins of the Palestinian village of Lifta, whose 3,000 residents were expelled from their homes during the Palestinian Exodus of 1948. Initially, Lifta appears empty, quiet, abandoned. But as the viewer begins exploring the space, Lifta’s ruins come to life: snippets of audio interviews conducted with the village’s former inhabitants and their descendants become audible, and spectral 3D imagery of bodies in motion begin to emerge.