No Man's Land

No Man’s Land presents a world map rendered in silk, where borders of territories in armed conflict are hand-embroidered in gold thread. The gesture recalls Kintsug, the Japanese practice of repairing broken objects with gold lacquer. Embroidery complicates any simple reading of repair. Each stitch joins the silk by piercing it, while the golden thread both exposes the wound and retraces the border that produced it. By relocating cartography from the institutions of the state to handwork, Barakeh shifts map-making from authoritative maculin abstraction towards embodied duration as a feminine act of reperation. This tension continues through the materials themselves: the fragility and pliability of silk draped over steel frame. Hardness and vulnerability, demarcation and repair, are brought into the same structure of political division remains visible.