Land Keepers: Unity of Blood & Fate, 2025

Hand-woven tapestry, audio
Exhibited at DEMO 2025, NEW INC & the New Museum, NYC, June 4–22, 2025
Curated by Remina Greenfield, Produced by Tony Tirador

Land Keepers: Unity of Blood & Fate I is a multimedia installation that attunes to the frequencies of land shaped by both Israeli colonial violence and Indigenous ancestral care. Centered on South Lebanon, the Occupied Golan Heights, and Palestine, the work charts the material scars left by Zionist settler ecocide — bombings, soil theft, invasive species, and greenwashing projects masquerading as sustainability.olan Heights, and Palestine, the work charts the material scars left by Zionist settler ecocide—bombings, soil theft, invasive species, and greenwashing projects masquerading as sustainability.

A triptych tapestry, with a panel for each territory, functions as both document and sensorial map. Hand-embroidered forms highlight practices of land stewardship — herding, beekeeping, foraging — while muted silhouettes represent non-endemic entities, methods of erasure, and sources of environmental destruction. Suspended pendant speakers transmit the voices of those who continue to tend these terrains, sharing songs, testimonies, and daily rituals that refuse elimination. Excerpts of these cultural lyrics appear as text on the backside of each panel in both English and Arabic.

These personal acoustic fragments act as counter-archives, interrupting the institutional narratives that shape public understanding. Attuned to the elegance and relational rhythms of native ecologies, the Land Keepers’ practices reflect a mode of perceptual care — where sensing becomes a form of stewardship. Here, the terrain is not merely represented; it is inhabited, remembered, and honored. Perception becomes a method of refusal — a way of living, sensing, and remembering otherwise.

EcoRove approached Bokja to collaborate on The Land Keepers: Unity of Blood and Fate, a piece designed by EcoRove and translated into textile form through Bokja’s storytelling and embroidery techniques. The collaboration emerged from shared grief and refusal, challenging colonial narratives that seek to erase our lands, our people, and our futures.

Through their connection to craft and regional artisanal traditions, Bokja reimagined EcoRove’s original drawing into a collective act of storytelling. The same hands practicing embroidery are the hands refusing colonial violence through art, craftsmanship, and green resistance.

The resulting triptych, Unity of Blood and Fate, depicts beekeepers, herders, foragers, and farmers whose ancestral practices persist under siege — from scorched-earth bombings in South Lebanon to greenwashed land theft in Palestine, to wind farms disguised under sustainability frameworks in Jawlan. Though violence takes different forms, its logic remains the same: displacement, extraction, and control.

This project was made possible with generous support from NEW INC, the New Museum, and the Alserkal Arts Foundation.