Over two months, the project conducted four oral-history interviews with former residents and their descendants.
“Today, members of the community live in Jish, Jadeidi-Makr and Haifa, but they all share a strong connection to Kafr Bir’im and its history,” Maroun tells WIRED Middle East.
The first interview was with a Palestinian woman named Jameeleh, whom the project refers to as teta, or “grandmother”. Rather than focusing on major historical events, she spoke about the rhythms of ordinary village life. “Much of what she described centred on food, a key pillar of Palestinian cultural life continuing until today. She recalled the girls of the village spending summer afternoons at a nearby river,” Ghannam says.
Restoring Bir’im
Coming Home seeks to preserve fragments of that history in virtual form. So far, Ghannam has reconstructed roughly one third of the village, beginning with the house of Abu Rayiq, one of the few structures still standing, and extending towards Bir’im’s northern entrance.
The northern part of the village proved the most difficult to reconstruct because fewer photographs and archival records of the area have survived. Seeing the work take shape in virtual reality marked a turning point for Ghannam.
“When I first explored the reconstruction in virtual reality, it felt as if a barrier had been broken. A flat, two-dimensional image suddenly became something tangible,” he says.
Ghannam plans to make the completed experience freely available. For descendants of Bir’im, he hopes it will offer a way to encounter a place many know primarily through inherited stories. For everyone else, he hopes it will change the way they understand what was lost.
“Not simply as a village,” he says, “but as someone’s home, someone’s entire world.”