Palestinian Wall Art Production: Livingness, Desire, and Sumud

ABSTRACT The Apartheid Wall has fractured the West Bank landscape and imposed a carceral geography on Palestinians. Yet, Palestinian Wall Artists intervene through practices that assert Palestinian presence, relation, and worldmaking amid Israeli violence and land dispossession. Centering Palestinian practices of sumud, futurity, and creative persistence, this article brings desire from Indigenous Geographies and Livingness from Black Geographies into analyses of Wall Art in the West Bank. Drawing on personal journal entries, photographs from a 2015 visit, and subsequent interactions with artists in the West Bank and Jordan, I examine how Wall Art performs crucial spatial and temporal functions: creating community spaces, fostering intergenerational solidarity and rights to place, and envisioning diverse futures. I also analyze how Wall Art's digital archiving on social media extends its reach, enabling forms of transnational solidarity, protest, and digital preservation that resist erasure and affirm Palestinian presence across space and time.