مطاط /(Elastic) is a piece exploring the tangibility, or lack thereof, regarding my Palestinian roots and identity stemming from my maternal side. My mother embarked on a tumultuous journey in her adolescence after being torn from her family, and home in Palestine at the age of six. The destruction of my mother’s home in Ramallah marked itself as the beginning of this journey of displacement and survival, resulting in her separation from the life she had in Palestine to this very day. Years later all I have of Palestine is oral history, leaving me with a more conceptual relationship to my roots and identity. This body of work entails the process of taking my mother’s description of her home, and using it as a prompt to create an immersive, reimagined return to Ramallah using projected Artificial Intelligence (AI) imagery. Rather than seeing the lack of an archive as an obstacle, I can now accept it as a nuance to this story, and a means to rectify the multiple aspects of this experience. In using the repeated visual motif of the elastic band, the work presents itself as an exploration of multiple temporal realities. Pulling my mother back into the past without being trapped in it gives her momentum to be launched into a futuristic return to what once was, and what may never be again.