I Feel Everything draws upon Jumana’s residency in ‘Ein Qiniya and her collaboration with the Water Diviners there, as well as from the Palestinian folk tale Half-a-halfling [Nos Nsais] - one of Jumana’s favourites - which tells the tale about a ‘half-child’ that is born of magic. 

Shot in and around ‘Ein Qiniya, including at the water source ‘Ein-al-Uwayneh, the film reimagines the half-child here as narrator, story-teller and body of water: ‘The place where we meet is inside this story. I carry you across the stream; I am the stream.’ The film’s narration flows between multiple voices, intertwining that of the child, mother, animal, water source, spirit, the living and non-living. It culminates in a chorus sequence adapted from Dr Tawfiq Canaan’s Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine, published in 1922, and voiced by Jumana’s friends and family. It is their hands that we see in the final frames of the film, passing water one to the other, much as with stories, some parts falling away and others carried forwards.

I Feel Everything was conceived in gratitude to the support and collaboration of Sakiya, ‘Ein Qiniya community, Water Diviners group Palestine, Issa Freij, and the Sharjah Art Foundation.

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.’