2015, Tel Aviv

From Fouad Ajami, discussing Lebanon:

“There was something there that was very fragile. The communities were of vastly different temperaments and different cultures of various levels of development. So when the map of the modern Arab world was drawn after World War I, this ....  was from the very beginning a quilt, an impossible quilt of communities."

I began to sketch the windows, the variety of grid configurations. Then, I bought fabric from the street I walked each day, a cobblestone street lined with stores selling fabric with colors and patterns in every style, and had these fabrics sewn into the configurations of the windows. Impossible things, too opaque to be windows; too flimsy to be walls. Impossible quilts of history, culture, and style.