Residents tell a story of the name Masafer. When the Ottoman tax collectors would arrive in the villages of Masafer, they would find no one to collect from. Having no other choice they would mark their inventories with zeros, sifers in Arabic. Zero/sifer: nothingness, emptiness. In Masafer Yatta, like with the zero, there is only the void. But it is in this void where the whole can be contained.

In the whole, life is simple, it’s the life of people that live very close to the earth, so close that many of them sleep in its womb in caves that they, their grandparents and their great grandparents carved into the stone; so simple that everyone is doing the same for survival, raising goats and sheep and practicing a shy and scarce agriculture.

In this void survives a Palestinian population that is unknown to most, in an area with no water, electricity nor roads, isolated from the rest by a belt of illegal Israeli settlements that make living in the place more and more difficult every day.

Today, the sifers are replaced with 918, a number assigned to this area by the Israeli army. In the 1970s, Masafer Yatta was proclaimed Firing Zone 918. The army requested that the communities be deported as soon as possible. The request is still pending today.

In the in-between, in the Interstice, the people of Masafer Yatta live, love, transform and adapt, maintaining a lifestyle that often is not a choice but a necessity, an act of rebellion, of insistence. Here, in the desert, dawn arrives. Nobody says anything.” Eduardo Soteras Jalil

The project is currently exhibited in the Middle East with the support of the A.M. Qattan Foundation and the Argentinean Representation in Ramallah.