ABC

ORGANISATION AND PLACE

abc.palestine is a nonprofit organization run by seven young Palestinians that aims to spread the bike culture around Palestine by giving the mobility to travel from area A to B to C.

Therefore, abc offers weekly bike sessions to children in Al Am’ari refugee camp. Beside learning how to ride a bicycle the kids find a community, stability and a platform that listens to them.

Al Am’ari camp is located in the east of Ramallah city and is one of the smallest refugee camps in the West Bank with a population of 6.100 inhabitants. The refugees mainly origin from Jaffa, Lydd, Remleh, and Jerusalem. Al-Amari camp has four schools and one health center. Like most other refugee camps, it is suffering from overcrowding, unemployment and bad living conditions.

 THE PROJECT

I have been volunteering with abc for two months. Considering my entire stay in Israel and Palestine, the time with abc had one of the biggest impacts on me. abc gave me the chance to participate, to be part of a community and to find sense in being a tourist and foreigner in the West Bank: By helping the kids I was helped to process the experience of occupation.

My weekly journeys from Jerusalem to Ramallah and the time in and around Al Am’ari camp are captured in the video. It gives fragmented insight in my contrasting experiences: the heaviness of occupation on one hand and the simple joy of biking kids on the other hand.

I developed the super 8 film by myself, left it uncut and unprocessed: 3.20 min raw material of one cassette of film, shot within 4 weeks. The video is accompanied by a series of black and white analogue printed photographs.

The work transcends time, posing questions about past, present, future and the meaning of (in-)mobility within the framework of the middle eastern conflict.

It is a tribute to abc.palestine’s impactful work and an attempt to process six month’s experiences of living and volunteering in the holy land.

The film was created in 2023, before the war in Gaza started. It has been screened in Unortiges Kino, Linz and in Bergamo, Italy as part of a charity event collecting funds to build an ambulance in Gaza.