There is something though that bothers me, and this is the use of the street names. This repeats in many of Zochrot’s actions, and I find it problematic. I researched the naming of the streets during the British Mandate and I know that there was a wide gap between the names on the maps to people’s lived geographies. In some places people used different names, in others they didn’t use any names. In Arab psycho-geography street names are less important than urban features – it is a perception of the landscape less as a grid but more of localities. Less linear, cartesian, more space and people based… based more on familiarity and existed primarily in oral culture.

Street names were used by the British as an instrument of bureaucratic and political control – it made it easier for them to map Jews and Arabs, and of course to control individuals (send the police, tax them etc etc).

So by reviving street names you may actually be reviving British impositions on the landscape. In addition, you seem to suggest that there is a “true name” that can be re-written into the landscape. But isn’t this what Zionists did in various naming campaigns? The issue is not who is right, but whether the whole obsession with signposting is not part of the problem.

Having said that, I like your project much better than Zochrot’s yellow-and-white signs, as your writing was ephemeral.