In the sieged Gaza strip, a tunnel is a structure of survival.
But after having become exposed, it morphs into a sign of
the colonizer, of the impossibility of movement embedded
within the structure itself.
The work Inscribed on Sight is based on an image of a Gazan
tunnel being partially exposed. Seeing the tunnel strips
it of its essence of being unseen; that is, the act of seeing
becomes an act of destroying. Only the exposed parts
of the tunnel are modeled here as fragments of a body
that has rather been ‘excavated,’ like an archaeological
artifact, its value being linked to a national identity and
image. In isolation, the fragments become a reference to
an architectural gesture, to authority. The found fragment
reconstructed here is built with a decorative element used
regionally in modernist buildings called claustra. The use
of it here is a superimposition of movement and dwelling –
and the impossibility of the two in this context – revealing
the entanglement of material references and politics.
In Saba Innab’s attempts to analyze the fragility of refuge,
exile, and the extraterritorial space, the tunnel becomes an
archetype of dwelling in the temporary.
