Bayt Wa Balad

Bayt wa Balad, Arabic for Home (بيت) and (و) Homeland (بلد), is a cultural initiative developed by the Museum of the Palestinian People and funded by the Mellon Foundation. The project takes the form of a digital cultural atlas, bringing together the museum’s collection of Palestinian art, material culture, and oral histories to expand global access within an urgent context of protection and preservation. At a time when Palestinian cultural heritage faces acute threat under ongoing genocide, Bayt wa Balad situates each object in its home and homeland, tracing its journey through space, place, and time. When mapped, each artwork echoes the journey of a person in migration, offering insight into the life of an object and the many hands it passed through on its way to the Museum in Washington, D.C.

The title Bayt wa Balad attempts to hold the layered and varied social and cultural associations that the word “home” carries for Palestinians in exile. It may evoke a single place or extend across multiple geographies at once. “Home” is also conceptual, residing with people and in the presence of community rather than in place alone. For Palestinians, “home” can refer to one, two, or more places simultaneously, shaped by an exile that began in 1947 during al-Nakba and continues today. The title also reflects the museum’s location and role in the United States, far from Palestine, where it undertakes cultural heritage work from Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital and a center of imperial power. Bayt wa Balad uses a basemap of historic Palestine; while “home” may hold multiple meanings, “homeland” remains singular. Historic Palestine, when decolonized on the map, captures the Palestinian collective consciousness of homeland.

Ethos and Methodology

Bayt wa Balad does not aim for geographic exactitude, nor does it attempt to reflect a contemporary political map. Maps are not, and never have been, neutral instruments. From biblical cartographies to colonial surveys, they have long served particular narratives. Here, the map is treated as a rare opportunity to visualize the collective memory of Palestinian elders who precariously hold memories of the land before Zionist violence and Israeli occupation.The research presented on this website privileges relationships between Palestinian places, materials, and people over fixed political place names or administrative divisions in order to better understand the object and its makers. 

While the project draws on vetted and peer-reviewed datasets produced by Palestinian organizations, the Bayt wa Balad team has devoted significant effort to reshaping the map so that it reflects the life of the objects and the people who made them. This approach informs a series of methodological decisions. Place names are presented through careful transliteration, and whenever available the team prioritizes Arabic place names first, followed by transliterations, and translations last. Georeferencing each object’s origins and their journey to the museum in Washington, DC were tackled at different scales, depending on the amount of information that could be gathered through the research. At times, it may be impossible to determine where an object was made and who made it, beyond identifying it as Palestinian or made in the diaspora. 

Mapping each object in the collection introduced a range of challenges specific to the Palestinian context, and while we are unable to solve the placelessness and namelessness that accompany certain objects and the maker(s) once known, we attempted to treat each one carefully and responsibly in the course of this project — and when possible, obtain oral histories that can help locate the provenance of the object on the map. The project therefore avoids the visual language of fixed points and rigid boundaries, focusing instead on a Palestinian spatial imaginary that supports these situated research practices and narratives. These choices acknowledge both the limits of mapping and the need to represent geography as it is culturally understood rather than politically imposed.

In alignment with the museum’s mission, Bayt wa Balad preserves the collection and the history it holds for future generations while expanding access beyond those who visit the space in Washington, D.C. Taken together, Bayt wa Balad operates as both a digital cultural atlas and a form of counter-mapping—one that situates material culture within a cartographic framework shaped by the ongoing struggle for Palestinian freedom and return.

Bayt wa Balad Team

Julia Pitner, Project Manager and Director of Operations

Steve Benzek, Director of Digital Experience

Wafa Ghnaim, Senior Research Fellow and Collections Manager

Laura Albast, Research Editor

Lena MK, Consultant and Doctoral Candidate at Université de Montréal

Contact Information

Email: baytwabalad@mpp-dc.org