Ex Libris
Ex Libris is an installation, public billboard and publication created by Palestinian artist and filmmaker Emily Jacir. The 2012 Ex Libris project works in tandem with Jacir’s previous 2001 Refugee Tent installation. Her Refugee Tent is a memorial to the villages destroyed during the Nakba in 1948, with the names of 418 villages embroidered onto the tent. The Nakba was the mass displacement of 750,000 Palestinians resulting in the death of 15,000 civilians, with massacres of civilian lives occurring across the nation.
Jacir builds off of her Refugee Tent in Ex Libris by looking at the books looted from houses in the villages across Palestine during the Nakba. When the state of Israel was established there was a looting of Palestinian homes during the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people. Approximately 70-80,000 books were stolen from Palestinian homes, libraries and institutions, this was a raid of cultural erasure to disintegrate the memory of Palestinian cultural histories. Some of the books were destroyed, but many formed the foundations of library collections. 6000 of the books taken are currently held at the Jewish National Library in West Jerusalem categorised as A.P. (Abandoned Property), other books stolen form part of the main collection but their provenance is considered ambiguous within the classification systems.
Over a period of two years Emily Jacir visited the Jewish National Library and took photographs of the A.P. books on her mobile phone. Ex Libris, featuring 178 of the photographs taken, forms Jacir’s library installation, and acts as a site of cultural memory of Palestinian lives before and during the Nakba. Jacir noted down signs of use in the books, including stamps, tears, coffee stains and the considerable amount of personal notes written inside them. These show the involvement of the books in people’s lives, and act as a memory of their previous owners, a reminder of their past.
The installation name of Ex Libris is a play on words with the Israeli software company the Ex Libris Group. The Ex Libris Group created their digital database in Jerusalem, using the libraries in the surrounding areas to influence their methodology of coding. The Ex Libris Group integrates library systems, providing the foundations of digital software under parent company ProQuest, which is currently used by universities and institutions across the globe. Israeli researcher, Gish Amit, discusses how Palestinian culture forms a foundation for documenting Israeli culture and incidentally as part of Israel’s technological advancements. He argues that ‘the ruin of Palestinian culture is the birth of a new Israeli consciousness based not only on erasing the Palestinian’s presence, but also on erasing their culture.’
If, according to Judith Butler, interpretation isn’t an act of a singular mind but a consequence of a discourse which frames our consciousness, then Emily Jacir challenges normative interpretations of Palestine to dismantle the often racist discourses on Palestine from the Western media. Jacir does this through humanising the people through their ‘abandoned property.’ She exposes the inner lives of Palestinians, in their messages to loved ones written in Arabic, their notes to themselves in their books and the pictures of family used as bookmarks. Jacir reveals the paradoxical nature of the dehumanisation of Palestinians under the Israeli state. Israel’s leaders have continued to assert that there is ‘no such thing’ as Palestinian people, yet the government funds, sustains and controls a vast archive of the belongings of Palestinian people in the Jewish National Library.
Through Ex Libris Emily Jacir rewrites and controls narratives of Palestinian history, using the evidence of life seen in the books as a way of asserting the existence of Palestinian people. She exposes the erasure and suppression of Palestinian heritage and culture under the hands of the Israeli government, who denote and distinguish the historic belongings of Palestinians as mere ‘abandoned property’.