Public Project
From the Ashes, I Rose
“From the ashes, I rose & I stitched the pieces of my soul back together with gold.” from the book Sparks of Phoenix by Najwa Zebian.
From the Ashes, I Rose depicts the stories of patients from the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Amman, Jordan, which provides orthopedic, plastic and maxillofacial surgery, physiotherapy, mental health support and prosthetic fitting. The patients, whose backgrounds vary from across the region including Palestine, Iraq and Yemen, mostly suffer from burns and/or amputation caused by conflict, warfare and aggression on civilians.
From the Ashes, I Rose confronts the harsh realities of human rights violations and the devastating effects of warfare on civilians in the SWANA region, including Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. Instead of focusing on the suffering of patients at the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hospital in Amman, Jordan, this project reinterprets their experiences as profound acts of resilience and resistance.
The project shifts the narrative to celebrate the protagonists' journeys of rebirth and transformation. Their injuries are depicted as sources of strength and empowerment. Their trauma is metaphorically transformed into superpowers, highlighting their extraordinary resilience.
Combining photography with mixed media created in collaboration with the protagonists, the project features personal visual narratives expressed through drawings and crafts on Polaroid photographs. Craft interventions using diamond painting, a therapeutic method used at the MSF hospital, where beeds are glued together to form a mosaic, symbolizing collective recovery and empowerment across diverse cultural backgrounds. In the showcased Polaroid photographs, the participants were invited to add their commentary to some of these photographs in whatever form they chose: from writing poetry to adding intricate crafts using diamond painting, they demonstrated their incredible abilities, despite physical limitations which include amputation and severe burns.
From the Ashes, I Rose is a project by Rehab Eldalil in collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières and Cortona on the Move.
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