| Andrea Merli Production and Coordination | Dr. Ingeborg Tiemann Participants | BU students and friends Concept and Photography
In 1915 one of America’s most famous and beloved
Brother Robert Smith, FSC, PhD Interim Vice Chancellor of Bethlehem University Vice President for Academic Affairs
writers, Robert Frost, published his poem, Mending Wall. Its first line makes clear his feeling about and
reaction to walls: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
His poem concerns two neighbors who must repair
annually a wall shared between their properties. While his neighbor believes “fences make good neighbors,”
Frost himself feels the wall does more harm than good and keeps people from knowing - and indeed being with - their neighbors.
Inside Out is a creative expression of the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual effects that
barriers like walls and fences have on individuals and on communities.
This project is the brainchild of Andrea Merli and
Dr. Ingeborg Tiemann, both of whom are faculty-staff
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members of the Bethlehem University community. I thank them for their initiative in carrying out this project which has had a very powerful effect on our students as well as members of the surrounding community, in particular those who live in the Aida Refugee Camp. Bethlehem University is grateful for the collaborative research project shared between its Department of
Social Science and its counter-part at KFH Cologne which lead to the Inside-Out project. We are also most
appreciative of the support and financial assistance given by the Civil Peace Work Program of AGEH and DAAD which made all of this possible.
Walls are walls, rigid and impenetrable. They block,
they exclude. They may evoke violent actions, often they breed hate. This is the prevailing experience. Yet, what would we see if walls turned transparent? What images would be created and viewed differently from the ones Dr. Ingeborg Tiemann
seen before? These were questions upon which the project was created. Such a process was experienced in Bethlehem, where a nine meter high wall divides the city from Jerusalem as it cuts through the West Bank. Young people living in Bethlehem, most of them in the Aida Refugee Camp, ventured to show their inside feelings towards the wall and other walls they face in their life. This project started with a joint academic research program of Bethlehem University and the University of Applied Sciences Northrhine-Westfalia Cologne, initiated by a Civil Peace Work program of AGEH which is financed by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and financially supported by DAAD.
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The questions students of both universities posed in focus group interviews with youth in Bethlehem and Cologne were: What are the needs, what are the wishes, the conflicts and the hopes of youth? �Not surprisingly, one of the clear results of this research was that young people in Bethlehem as in Cologne are very much concerned about many restrictions they have to tackle in their lives: limitations in the society at large, in the field of politics, in their families. Sometimes they spoke also about a "wall" within themselves. For many of the young Bethlehemites different kinds of restrictions were connected with the concrete wall cutting off the city from Jerusalem. Against the background of these results, the students of the Social Sciences Department of Bethlehem University thought of a project to be launched with youth in the Bethlehem area which could express the results of the research. Together with Andrea Merli, photographer and lecturer at Bethlehem University who suggested the concept, this project with youth in the Aida Refugee Camp has been developed. First, the Social Sciences students practiced the idea themselves: they tried to express their inner feelings and thoughts in the face of an invisible wall representing a barrier they experience in life. In the second stage, photos were taken with youth in the Aida Camp. The results are now exhibited here. The process itself, the encounter with one’s inner feelings and wishes, was not carried forward without some resistance. Most of the young people were not familiar with expressing their emotions verbally and visually, bringing the "inside out". It was a struggle for them to open up to authentic feelings, to show the bottled-up feelings in their different and personal shadings. It may be considered as a sign of hope that they undertook the effort, with growing enthusiasm. This project did not erase neither the restrictions nor the wall. But turning the inside out, revealing one’s own feelings in a creative manner, this is an attempt to step out of the threatening silence of walls.
Andrea Merli
My open hands touch invisible walls. They challenge
the barriers affecting my life.
Here, you seem to break through the glass with
powerful confidence. There, he looks at the ground
in search of a track. Another one digs into memories
which won’t fade away. She screams, she stares. He doesn’t know what’s coming up next. But hopes.
Our backgrounds are different, and so are experiences. Perceptions may vary as problems may change, across places and moments in life. But facing high barriers,
whatever their nature, is not open to choice. Touching
the wall prompts tangible contacts with intangible limits. Here, in the occupied Palestinian Territory, barriers
are plenty. They look very solid, made as they are of
metal and concrete. But physical obstacles to physical movements are few of the roadblocks we face in our walks.
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Barriers take innumerable forms. Young men and women meet with all kinds: some stand up right ahead, some grow inside, some are built all around. Some, sometimes, are dismantled and fall into rubble.
Barriers may last a day in a checkpoint, a month in a bed, a year in a cell, a minute in a phone call, an entire life in a tidy office, a refugee camp or a silent room. Certain barriers divide for a while, others unite forever.
Barriers are borders, fears, doubts, pressures, ambitions, languages, prejudices, powers, expectations, worries, traditions, permits, limits, memories. It happens, at times, that some can be overcome. But not avoided, even there where barriers seem not to belong: imagination.
Inside Out aims at capturing the ways I relate to my barriers, at this very point in my space and my time. Ask
me not what exactly is my barrier. What matters is nothing but my inner awareness. It’s me and my wall, clear to the eyes of my conscience alone. I can call it by name, I can leave my fingerprints on its surface, I can see
what’s beyond, at times. But if I’m ever to move from this spot, I must deal with my wall. Perhaps it’s the same as yours, perhaps it’s mine alone.
Here in the midst of the most fragmented land, whatever the case, I know we are all with our hands stretched out in search of our crack in the wall.
I’m always in the middle of the way, I’m always in the middle of the ford.
I can’t be like that one overthere, I can’t take that last step of disappearing in the mountains, enlightened. Because I’m not enlightened. T. Terzani
| Andrea
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In truth, I did not run away from him, but I ran away from myself. I do not wish to give up my small,
egotistic feelings. I do not want to admit what I am. I continue to walk without enthusiasm. Nassar Ibrahim
| Rojan
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… as the hoofs’ horseshoes of a foundered horse would unfortunately have crunched and crunched upon a quaint slat of marble, babbling barrel-shaped mirror…
| Franck
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The road... We have no road.
The pavement is narrow and all those who pass are harvested by flies as if silence was absent for a moment. As if silence... Y. Al Khal
| Najwan
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I’m confused.
I’m Palestinian but they say I’m not because of my Israeli ID…
| Amiral
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Hold tight, since you are the last.
And the last stone is in your left hand. N. Al Ali
| Majd
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And if I cannot now, I will wait. And I will be the voice, the eyes, the ears and the strength for those who are denied. I will wait, but I will continue.
| Luisa
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And if my road really headed that way?
| Tommaso
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It's time to overcome all the obstacles that limit my freedom and ambitions. I'm human, looking for a better life and Identity, outside these walls.
| Reem
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If they take me a thousand miles away, and if they make me a funeral as if I had been murdered, my head will not bow, and my tears will not flow. M. Darwish
| Mohammad
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I don't want to forget how to smile.
| Nour
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| Mohammad
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Our weeping bids farewell to the green land,
bids farewell to its murdered trees every day.
| Wafa'a
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You, whose palms and eyes are red, you should have hope. Night is vanishing. Neither the investigation room nor the chains are staying forever. Prisoners' song
| Mohammad
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I will endure until endurance gives up on my patience. I will be patient until patience learns that I am patient. I am enduring something that is more bitter than patience.
| Nidal
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In every soul there is something which already was there before all sorrows began.
| Shada
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Should we wait for God to help us
or should we start and let Him guide us.
| Osama
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And going under the glaring sun To feel with cheerless wonder How is the entire life With all its torment In this going on A massive wall Topped with
Sharp fragments of a bottle E. Montale
| Laura
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Emotions are powerful forces within the human mind. Fear, especially, has a remarkable way of generating evidence to support itself. J. Dobson
| Lina
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I was a foetus
that smashed small windows to see my home’s blind windows
| Moncho
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I couldn’t but scream…
Before those limits inside every one of us Like transparent blades of glass There, to halt you each time
To make a battle out of each day … I couldn’t but scream …
| Sara
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BOOKLET design
| Amer Mukarker
PALESTINE
ITALY
THANKS
Rojan Ibrahim
Sara Faustinelli
Dr. Norma Hazboun Masrieh
Najwan Yasin
Laura Panza
Chair at the Department of Social Sciences
Amiral Yousef
Tommaso Massai
of Bethlehem University
SPAIN
Ms. Rana Salfiti
Nour Mickel
Luisa Lopez
of Bethlehem University
Mohammad Abu Srour
Moncho Iglesias
Majd Abu Aker Reem Musleh Mohammad Abu Srour
Mr. Munther Amireh
Wafa'a Ashur Mohammad Yousef "Habashi" Nidal Awes Shada Abu Srour
Instructor at the Department of Social Sciences
FRANCE
Youth Activities Center, AIDA Camp, Bethlehem
Franck Martin
Ms. Ina Borkenstein
Osama Rock
Programme Coordinator at KFH Cologne
Lina Abu Farha Ms. Jihan Anastas Director of Bethlehem Peace Center
Mr. Bassam Abd el Salam Ayesh
CONTACTS
|
Andrea Merli yoxeron@gmail.com
- Ingeborg Tiemann | itiemann@bethlehem.edu
Carpenter
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