The project was shot and developed over seven years, from 2018 to 2024, across our homes in Amman, Jordan; Brooklyn and then Staten Island, New York; and Beit Hanina, Palestine.

I moved to Amman, Jordan with my grandmother shortly after graduating college, having been raised in Brooklyn my entire life and never having lived in the Middle East. What started as an intention of a few months together, slowly became years shaped by caregiving, grief, and profound transformation, as it was during this period that my grandmother’s dementia progressed significantly, reshaping our daily life and transforming my role from granddaughter to full-time caregiver. The work is composed of documentary photography, video, audio recordings, personal essays, poetry, and the archival preservation of my grandmother’s oral stories, and songs.

Though the project centers on the relationship between myself and Tata, it is ultimately for any woman tethered to her matriarchal lineage and for those who recognize their own stories within this one. It engages both art audiences and broader communities, including families navigating care, memory, and cultural continuity. The title comes from my grandmother’s nickname, الأم الحنون, which translates from Arabic to “the loving mother,” a name given to her for her nurturing presence, leadership, and deep sense of responsibility to her community, and speaks to the idea of this generational continuity through the matriarchal line: if she is the loving mother, then I naturally become the loving daughter. As I moved through this experience, I became deeply interested in the evolution of identity across generations, particularly the role women, especially in Indigenous communities, hold within the tension between patriarchal expectation and matriarchal authority. 

The project examines the intersection of personal and collective histories in Palestinian life, where natural erasure through aging and memory loss exists alongside the violent, imperial erasure caused by displacement and genocidal wars. At its core, the work is an act of preservation, holding onto cultural knowledge, familial memory, and embodied feminine wisdom in the face of loss. Over these seven years, I realized I happened to capture a poignant moment in our lives, of me stepping into my womanhood and finding myself, in the same moments she began to lose herself.