Late in the spring of 2017, the artist Emily Jacir launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the renovation of her family home, which she was in the process of transforming into a major research center for artists, filmmakers, and scholars. Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research was a project she had conceived two years earlier with her younger sister, the filmmaker Annemarie Jacir. As a nimble, hands-on arts institution for the twenty-first century, situated right in the middle of one of the most intractable political conflicts on earth, it was designed with a dual purpose. The first was to create the conditions for dynamism, to create a hospitable and tenacious place for local, mostly early- to mid-career artists to gather and work, imagine and produce. The second was to provoke a radical rethinking of how history is used in the present. The heart of the house is a collection of disparate materials, and the most important part of the renovation effort was the preservation and digitization of an archive of interest to researchers working on the Ottoman Empire, the Mediterranean world, and the cosmopolitan role of Bethlehem in an earlier era of globalization.

Built in 1890, Dar Jacir is older, and more modestly scaled, than the elaborate and better-known Jacir Palace next door, which was built in 1910 by Jacir’s great-grandfather, Suleiman, a merchant and the former mayor of Bethlehem. As the story goes, the once wealthy and powerful Jacir family went bankrupt in the 1930s and lost the palace to the British, who used it as a prison. The building was later used as a school. It is now a luxury hotel. Dar Jacir, by contrast, was built by Suleiman’s father, Jacir’s great-great-grandfather Yusuf, the moukhtar of Bethlehem. It is a humbler two-story home with terraced gardens. Because it is located perilously close to Israel’s separation wall, it stands on a now-abandoned street and prior to the renovation was repeatedly damaged in clashes between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers.

Like her sister, Emily at the time of envisioning Dar Jacir was at the apex of her career. She had won a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, a Prince Claus Award, and the Hugo Boss Prize. She had an established record of producing powerful, ruminative, and challenging works, always sited amid densely complex political terrain, involving processes of gathering and dispersal, pulling people together to stitch place-names into a tent (Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948) or taking off to various parts of a discombobulated Palestine to fulfill a wish or enact a mundane task for a sampling of people whose freedom of movement was for one reason or another curtailed (Where We Come From). For years, she had been looking at migration paths, old transport networks, and the obstacles limiting travel in the Occupied Territories. Works such as the sound installation Untitled (servees), originally conceived for the Jerusalem Show in 2008, evoked an ease of movement (radiating out from Palestine to Beirut and Damascus) that is totally unthinkable today but fully embodied Jacir’s multifaceted research into the old Jerusalem-Hebron Road, which runs through Bethlehem and passes in front of the family home.

The late scholar Edward Said once wrote that Emily Jacir’s work creatively slipped through the obstructions of borders and bureaucracies that otherwise stultified the Palestinian experience. Perhaps it was the fate of all Palestinians, Said suggested, to have a proxy, a stand-in, whether it was an artist fulfilling an action of one’s behalf or a juggernaut of painful memories and logistical delays taking the place of things so seemingly straightforward as a passport, a country, and a home to return to. Jacir, who is nominally based in Rome, has out of pure conviction taken on an immensely complicated task in returning to Bethlehem, a city that is largely isolated not only from the world outside of Palestine but from key parts of the West Bank itself. The house is squeezed between two major refugee camps. The surrounding area is also in the midst of a baffling gentrification boom.

But because her campaign had all the attributes and excellence of her artwork—and a good sense of humor, too—she surpassed her initial fundraising goals and was able to renovate the house and open Dar Jacir on schedule in early 2018. Since then, she has developed a robust, visionary, and necessarily agile two-year plan for residencies, public programs, and archival digitization and research, with an emphasis on total creative freedom and an interest in Palestinian migration to Latin America. She has built up a capable staff, established partnerships with the Institute for Palestine Studies and community groups in the nearby Aida and Azza refugee camps, and organized a workshop with the artist Michael Rakowitz, a seminar with the writer Alexandra Handal, and a landscape residency with the architect Vivian Sansour. Some of the most compelling, daring, and politically astute aspects of the program involve agricultural projects to (re)green the terraces, and the Ottoman archive, which is poised to shake up prevailing approaches to the region’s history.

“The people of Bethlehem and [the nearby village of] Beit Jala have a long history with Chile that goes back to the mid-nineteenth century,” says Jacir[1]. There are now half a million people of Palestinian ancestry in Chile, and the majority of them, centered in Santiago, trace their origins directly back to Bethlehem. The same can be said for the Colombian city of Barranquilla. The archives of Dar Jacir include rich, raw, previously unstudied material for scholars investigating “the trajectory spanning four continents and linking Bethlehem to Santiago, Barranquilla, Beirut, and Paris between 1860 and 1914,” says Jacir. “These documents are especially precious and rare because they date from the golden era of Bethlehem, prior to British rule, when the city was a cosmopolitan and commercial center. Our collection shows how ideas, people, and goods moved across major continents. Situating Bethlehem in the context of world history, it challenges nationalist and elite narratives of Mediterranean and Palestinian history as well as Eurocentric ideas about global movements. Our archive offers a powerful rethinking of Bethlehem’s mercantile and social history as well as the economic history of the Ottoman Empire and its international relations.” It is also, more practically speaking, almost unheard of to find a Palestinian house today with its contents intact, given the long history of theft and destruction all around.

But the core of Dar Jacir’s program is the community it is already serving. “We don’t have an audience,” says Jacir.[2] “We have active participants.” It isn’t a passive space awaiting activation. It is a place already marked by encounters, between local and international practitioners, between “envisioning the future” and “experiencing historical continuities.” In a part of the world where politically engaged artists since the 1990s have passed through dramatic phases of archival enchantment, fashion, and crisis, the work of Dar Jacir is finding a bold, practical, and imaginative way forward. Just as all of Jacir’s work in art-making, teaching, and cultural institution-building is ultimately concerned with movement against cynicism, mediocrity, stagnation, Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research is fundamentally committed to the transmission of hope through ideas, knowledge, and a hard-won intimacy with history.

[1] In an email to the author, September 8, 2017.

[2] In a conversation with the author, August 3, 2018.