13 Days in March
In 13 Days in March (an ongoing project) I used AI technology and real family photos to re-envision my mother’s undocumented immigration from communist Romania to Israel in 1962, imagining how she might have recorded the journey had she possessed a camera.
On March 1st, 1962, my grandparents, Jeannette and Mauricio Zalisch, and their 16-year-old daughter, Mariana – who would later become my mother – embarked on a 13-day journey from Bucharest to Haifa after years of waiting for permission to leave. Forced to renounce their citizenship and surrender most of their possessions, they travelled by train through Yugoslavia to Italy, then sailed from Naples via Greece to Israel, arriving at Ma'abarat Kiryat Haim - a transit camp that became their home for seven years.
For this project, I conducted thorough interviews with my mother about each day of their journey and the months leading up to it, starting from the moment they received their permit. I recreated the moments she recollected as photographic visuals, shaped by my vision of how she might have framed the journey, merging historical plausibility with my imaginative interpretation. The work reflects both a personal act of remembrance and a broader reflection on how AI technology can recover, reinterpret, or imagine visual histories that were never photographed.