“إذا بحت بسرك للريح فلا تلمها حين تفشيه للشجر" “If you reveal your secret to the wind, do not blame it when it spreads it to the trees." — Khalil Gibran
This work takes its name from Arabic proverbs about secrecy — how deeply a secret sits within a person, as precious and guarded as blood, as hidden as something dropped into a well. In these traditions, a secret is not simply information kept private. It is something held with care, something whose weight changes the moment it is spoken.
“سرّك في شجرتك”Sirak fi Shajartak grew out of a series of workshops conducted as part of the Hiba’s master research, using art as an unspoken language — a space where people could express what words alone could not carry. At the end of each session, things were left unspoken, entrusted without being named. Hiba began to think of herself as a tree: holding what was given, without letting it fall away.
When she returned to Palestine for fieldwork in late 2025, she found the olive trees — sacred in Palestinian life and culture — in a difficult season. Many were not bearing fruit. Access to them had been restricted by settler attacks and the tightening of movement under Israeli occupation, leaving trees untended during the olive harvest, one of the most significant traditions in Palestinian collective life. People said it was as if the trees were feeling what was happening around them.
The work moves between ecological and political reality, between what can be held and what can no longer be reached. Through collected stories, sounds, and secrets, “سرّك في شجرتك”Sirak fi Shajartak proposes the tree as both witness and container — keeping alive what has been separated, restricted, or silenced. In a time when Palestinians are cut off from their land and from the trees that once structured their lives, this work asks what it means to hold memory, and what it costs to carry it.
