In An Abridged Draft for a Letter to Leila Khaled, a digital flight simulator is repurposed to reconstruct a historical landscape, and reconfigure the political relations embedded in the viewpoint of military aerial reconnaissance.

The Palmach Aerial Photographs Collection includes more than 600 images taken by the Palmach, a Zionist paramilitary organization, on the eve of the Palestinian Nakba (the forced displacement of Palestinians from their homeland, in 1947-49). While the collection was created in an aerial reconnaissance effort, today it provides a rare record of Palestinian landscape, depicted on the verge of its imminent erasure. The work uses a flight simulator video game to revisit the aerial viewpoint over a reconstructed landscape, by superimposing the historical collection over contemporary satellite and topographical data.

Through its narrated essay component, the work discusses the contradictory afterlife of a collection produced within a military project that sought to erase the very landscape it now documents. How does this erasure persist in contemporary archival practices and politics of access, and how can digital reconstruction move beyond the reproduction of previous political orders?

The work addresses Palestinian militant and activist Leila Khaled, inviting her to pilot a virtual flight tour over the collection and occupy the aerial viewpoint from which the landscape was surveyed. In doing so, it seeks to challenge the politics of verticality in Palestine — who is granted access to traverse territory, and who has the authority to reconstruct its representations.