This collaged image is part of an ongoing body of work which explores and maps haunted water sites via Palestinian folklore. Activated by spirits, demons, angels, and jinn, the water sourced from these sites is believed to hold curative and transformative powers.
By employing anthropological and ethnographic methodologies and calling on the memories of elders, Abboud maps out sacred wells, oases, streams, and springs cited in Palestinian folktales. These references have been her source materials for the past decade: she attempts to track the physical sites of stories and their occupants or occupiers today, documenting their social, cultural, political, climatic transformation through abstraction and representation. By locating the sites described in folktales and gathering detailed research notes, drawings, photographs, and maps, she develops imagistic collages, which animate and preserve Palestinian tales and rituals, and reclaim the Indigenous history of the landscape.