Sabella expresses how Jerusalem is changing rapidly and is transforming to something unknown and unfamiliar, especially for the people who grew up in it. Places are being destroyed and historical memories are being replaced. In fear of the continuing erasure of the city's memory, Sabella started wandering around the places which he felt connected to in order to document their 'existence'. He picked up a stone from each place and later printed on it an image which could have been the image of the existing location, its trace after its demolition or if the 'original' place vanished, then Sabella imagined how the place might have looked in the past.

Today, six years after the creation of this artwork, it clearly traces back how Sabella started experiencing the disappearance of Jerusalem and its transformation to an image, eventually leading to the creation of his key project jerusalem in exile (2006).

till the end, spirit of the place

2004

photo emulsion on Jerusalem stone

UNIQUE (one original)

Steve Sabella in Exile - Conversation with the Artist
Retrospective Review by Sara Rossino - text in Italian & English
Exhibition Catalogue published by the Metroquadro Gallery in Rivoli, Turin - May, 2010

Was this consciousness already present in Till the end? What was the meaning of this work?
"Today I understand better the essence of that experience. Till the end continued my obsession with hyperrealities from Search (1997) and End of Days (2003) where I penetrated through the unseen light an imaginary world which felt for me more real that reality itself. I started living in this constructed reality. So I ask myself today, whether the images on the stones were early visual prophecies about what was happening to Jerusalem and its transformation into an image (eventually disappearing) and how in many ways many of these images accompanied me from childhood."

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Steve Sabella - I am From Jerusalem
Christa Paula
Exhibition Review for The Empty Quarter Gallery in Dubai

Consequently, Sabella mounted a visual ‘rescue mission.’ He revisited places of personal importance, photographed each site and collected a stone which was then used as the base for the photographic image. The original installation was exhibited outdoors at the Khalil Sakakini Gallery in Ramallah. It has an archaeological quality to it and emanates a profound sense of loss. Yet it also offers an archive of subjective memories without resorting to the sentimental.

The following year, Till the End - Spirit of Place was conceptually expanded into a monumental collaborative undertaking, gathering images and memories of Jerusalem as remembered by Palestinians globally. The results were to underscore the artist’s hypothesis: that Jerusalem had been exiled and replaced by a hyper-real construct, a simulacrum deployed in the name of ideology which, not only intended to destroy the plurality of the city but, ultimately, aims to colonize the imagination. The corroboration of his long held suspicions left the artist in a state of near physical and mental collapse.

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Steve Sabella
Retrospective review by Martina Corgnati
Contemporary Practices Journal, VI, 2010

... Steve Sabella emulsified some rocks with the image of places, buildings or fragments of a landscape representative of his childhood’s environment, that was already transforming and disappearing. The city is changing, it’s being transformed, covered by complex and even conflicting meanings that it didn’t have before. Well, this kind of experience has not been made just by people who lived or have grown up in Jerusalem: Which city did not undergo an important, maybe even excessive or violent transformation within the past few years, both in the Arab World and outside? What happened for example to Cairo, London, New York where Steve Sabella actually lived and studied, and at the moment resides in London?

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