MARYAM AK - PHOTOGRAPHER/RESEARCHER
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TREE OF LIFE- ongoing
This project - still in its earliest iterations - is about my family’s deep-rooted relationship to the olive tree, a relationship that is also symbolic of our regions’ cultural, spiritual, and material attachment to the tree.
The people of Eidun, where my family is from, like many people in Jordan and Palestine, were olive growers. In the late 1960’s; my paternal Grandfather Shawkat had bought large tracts of olive groves, in Jerash, a few miles away from his home village. Today my family produces and sells the olive oil.
Between September and December of every year the olive harvest season commences, it is the calendar around which the family functions. Every year, local, migrant and refugee workers gather to collect and grind the harvest, to be sold as liquid gold throughout the year and given as gifts, tokens of friendship and love. The project is a documentation of the generational relationship between families and the land, between man and the tree, a relationship of care, tenderness, belonging, of peasantry and class transformations, but also about labor practices, the disappearance of rural culture, and commercialization of agricultural produce.