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Towards a Cartography of Mapping Frequencies and Wavelengths
Jumanah Abbas

Frequencies and wavelength are the relational backbones to the telecommunication infrastructures we build. They are sites of mediation, but they are equally sites of domination and contestation. As this medium propagates from one point to another, the behavior of radio propagation is not dictated by borders or national boundaries, but by the governmental administration of the wavelengths. For instance, the Israeli state governs the release of frequencies across the occupied territories of the West Bank. Blocking access to frequencies is a tactic deployed by the government to prevent, and suspend, the Palestinians from exercising their rights to use the technology and improve the urban city's conditions. As a result, the cellular landscape of the West Bank becomes characterized by the contradictory policies and the uneven development of the telecommunication infrastructures, unfolding the ways that the checkered cellular coverage can come to matter both spatially and politically. The geopolitical power over the enclaved Palestinian regions is secured within the realm of the electromagnetic sphere and its algorithms. This proposal examines how this appropriated cellular network in the occupied West Bank territorialise the land differently, which are both expanding and constraining ways of inflicting violence. In this publication, I reveal how transmission of 3G signals follow a particular spatial order and obey the territorial demarcations that are imposed on Palestinian territories of the West Bank. The publication is accompanied with a series of maps revealing enclaved cellular spaces that are as enclosed, demarcated and confined as the cities in West Bank.

Bio Jumanah Abbas is an architect, a writer, and a curator, working through an ecology of interdisciplinarity that architecture debates, concepts and dialogues engage with. Jumanah received her master’s degree in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practice from Columbia University (2020) and her undergraduate degree in Architecture from American University of Sharjah (2018).

2019 - ongoing, 148 x 210 mm

Author Jumanah Abbas
Editor Ameneh Solaiti 
Location New York City; Doha