Upon arriving in Cádiz for a residency that happened to fall on the Jewish high holidays, my partner Alma googled ‘Synagogues in Cádiz’ and found a one-star review of an empty sandlot in what was the old Jewish quarter:

“If these are the old Jewish streets, it deserves a plaque or a sign or something interesting. It’s just an empty square. Just like the Jewish community of Spain.”

Visiting the square, I found a small patch of land, seemingly detached from time— a memento of the mass fleeing of the Jewish communities who fled Spain during the Inquisition.

Land is lived upon, conquered, cleansed, and repopulated—yet through all its transformations, it remains, like a container changing its contents over time.

I later returned and drew a map of the forced migration routes across the lot, each line marking a path taken from Spain to the broader diaspora. As children played and competed for dominance over the ball, the map became dispersed and abstract, as was the testament of the past—not a deliberate act on their part, but one that took place nonetheless.

Does the land know what lives on its surface? What once existed and what replaced those things? In its metamorphosis, does it absorb and retain all this, or is it wiped clean? Is its memory abstracted just as that of the sandlot?

In the grotesque times we’re living in, it would be remiss not to see parallels between the expulsion in my cultural ancestry and what is now taking place in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel’s practices of ethnically cleansing Palestinian life from these areas under the guise of security make clear that historical persecution and multigenerational trauma tragically inform these acts of crass expansionism.

As time and the horrors charge forward, I frequently wonder what, from all this, will be remembered and what story will be told.

Watch a video of the piece here.

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Video by Víctor Sánchez

Project produced by Festival de Arte Contemporáneo de Cádiz (FACC) in partnership with Void Projects and La Cuna Plataforma