Hide Your Water from the Sun takes its title from the belief that natural water sources hidden from the light of the sun have more curative potency than exposed waters. Together with Issa Freij, Jumana undertook to map out locations of haunted water sources (spirit-waters) across the West Bank, Jerusalem and northern Israel.

Guided by her childhood memories of the landscape and the stories she was told about its hauntings, as well as by Dr Tawfiq Canaan’s study, Jumana and Issa sought to find the sites that were once believed to be inhabited by supernatural beings — inhabiting (and guarding) natural springs, wells, streams, caves, trees, wells.

This video was part of several audio/visual/performance sketches between 2014-2017, presented in several locations. The narration in the film was originally conceived as a word-based performance.

Jumana Emil Abboud (b. 1971, Shefa’amer) is Palestinian and is currently based between Jerusalem and London where she is completing her PhD. Her practice is grounded in the Palestinian cultural landscape and she draws on the traditions of folklore, myth-making and storytelling that once animated community life, particularly around times of family or community gathering, such as seed-sowing, water collection or harvest. She works across drawing, installation, video and performance, often collaboratively, exploring personal and collective memory and practices of sharing and re-telling as ways to address experiences of loss and longing and the impacts of decades of dispossession and annexation.

For more than 10 years, Jumana has focused on oral histories relating to water sources, springs, wells and rivers: ‘For thousands of years, the natural landscape we lived in in Palestine was a terrain of enchantment. The natural water source – spring, well, stream – was such a terrain, inhabited by spirits, good and bad. I like to refer to such waters as spirited sites.’