Inland is an invention
from the shores
Title Municipalidad de la Palestina, Cordoba - Argentina 2022
Format 100x170cm
Description Charcoal on canvas, gold leaf, iron and rope
Title Cantón Palestina, Guayas - Equador 2022
Format 100x170cm
Description Charcoal on canvas, gold leaf, iron and rope
Title Alcadía de Palestina, Caldas - Colombia 2022
Format 100x170cm
Description Charcoal on canvas, gold leaf, iron and rope
Title Palestina de las Cruces - Petén 2022
Format 100x170cm
Description Charcoal on canvas, gold leaf, iron and rope
Title Palestina de los Altos - Quetzaltenango 2022
Format 100x170cm
Description Charcoal on canvas, gold leaf, iron and rope
Title Palestina de Alagoas - Brasil 2022
Format 100x170cm
Description Charcoal on canvas, gold leaf, iron and rope
Title Palestina do Pará - Brasil 2022
Format 100x170cm
Description Charcoal on canvas, gold leaf, iron and rope
Title Palestina de Goiás - Brasil 2022
Format 100x170cm
Description Charcoal on canvas, gold leaf, iron and rope
Title Palestina de São Paulo - Brasil 2022
Format 100x170cm
Description Charcoal on canvas, gold leaf, iron and rope
In El interior es un invento de las orillas Emilia Estrada takes the name Palestine as a displaced word, reinscribed onto the Latin American map over nearly a century. The installation brings together nine banners of raw fabric, on which emblems and cartographies of homonymous municipalities named Palestina are rendered in charcoal and gold leaf. Founded between 1894 and 1988, these towns are scattered from Argentina to the Guatemala–Mexico border, including four in Brazil, one in Ecuador, and two in Colombia. The search for these Palestinas predates the installation itself.Since childhood, growing up within her family’s Palestinian diasporic history, the artist has approached this place as the object of an insistent search. Here, the recurrence of the name produces neither belonging nor a shared origin, but instead displaces the gesture of searching toward an inquiry into naming as an act of occupation.
Each banner bears municipal coats of arms drawn in charcoal, distinct in their languages, heraldic traditions, and regimes of visualization. Their graphic variety highlights the heterogeneity of these foundings while also revealing the persistence of a civilizational imaginary.
On the reverse, cartographic fragments derived from satellite imagery extend this gesture: paths, outlines, and voids are illuminated with gold leaf, in a deliberately free use of cartography. The banner, a form historically tied to civic affirmation and to marching, appears here suspended, withdrawn from any linear narrative. Instead, The illuminated voids become central. They glimmer with the reading of these territories as available spaces, interiors to be occupied, unified, and named. At the same time, the research that sustains the installation stems from the impossibility of visualizing historical Palestine on digital mapping platforms such as Google Earth. This erasure leads Estrada first to a family archive and then to a broader investigation into immigration, colonization, and territorial occupation. When visiting one of the Palestinas in the interior of São Paulo state, what emerges is not the presence of explicit diasporic ties, but rather the persistence of the idea of a “promised land,” a symbolic horizon reiterated by projects of progress and national unification. The name Palestine thus comes to condense overlapping projections - the European imaginary of the Holy Land and the nineteenth-century immigration projects of the Americas. Rather than converting this absence into a complete image, El interior es un invento de las orillas keeps it in operation.
