In the Naqab/Southern Palestine (El-Janub), also known as the Be’er Sheva District or Bilad Gaza, there are 47 unrecognized Bedouin villages—most of them historical.
Since 1948, an entire population across this vast southern region has been denied access to basic governmental infrastructure: roads, water, electricity. Today, nearly 150,000 people live without a registered home address. On official and global maps, these villages appear as blank fields, forests, factories, solar farms, or military zones—rendered completely invisible.

Israel's post-1948 attempts to “settle” the Bedouin population have largely failed. The establishment of seven state-planned townships erased the geographical and cultural heritage embedded in the landscape, leaving people—myself among them—suspended in a void, expected to adapt to a modern colonial model.

After my first visit to an unrecognized village, I realized that these spaces are the only grounds from which I can reclaim our spatial truth—from the inside out. This realization led me to begin documenting the villages. Later, in collaboration with the Regional Council for the Unrecognized Villages, we developed a method to turn community-collected information into a cultural map—one where the dwellers themselves identify, narrate, and define the most meaningful sites in each village.