At the opening at PS1 where Emily Jacir's Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages That Were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948 was first exhibited in the spring of 2001, an Israeli woman, originally from Iraq, approached the artist and burst into tears. She thanked Jacir for the opportunity to "participate in this history." Moments later, the artist looked inside the Memorial (a refugee tent, like those distributed by UNRWA and the Red Cross) to find a man huddled in the corner, sobbing. He was from one of the four hundred and eighteen villages remembered in this extraordinary piece.

About four months after the present intifada started (September 2000), having known for years that she wanted to work on a memorial to these villages, Emily Jacir acquired a large burlap refugee tent. Onto its sides and roof, she penciled four hundred and eighteen names of Palestinian villages (based on Walid Khalidi's detailed book, All That Remains: the Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948). A blank space was left around the door; a poignant reminder that there are many more names—of villages, destroyed, depopulated and occupied since 1948—that could, and perhaps will, be added. Jacir then started, with thick black thread, to sew them onto the tent, perforating the fabric with her thoughts and feelings of that particular moment. Having realised the enormity of the task—each village would take approximately six hours to complete—she decided instead to open her studio, twenty-four hours a day, to anyone who was willing to help. Over a hundred and forty people came, many were Palestinians from these very villages or Israelis who had grown up on their remains. Others who joined were from Syria, Morroco, Tunisia and Lebanon, forming what Jacir calls "a sort of Arab collective." Some came—from various other nations—with little knowledge or direct personal connection to the history of Israel, but who wanted nevertheless, to partake in this special process of remembrance.

The stitching itself testifies to the collective nature of the project. It is varied, at times erratic and loose, at others meticulous and orderly; multiple hands were involved in the making of this memorial. A community of friends and volunteers enlivened Jacir's studio as they sewed—talking, reading (Khalidi's book was ever-present and constantly referred to), discussing politics, singing (on many occasions musicians came to play for the stitchers), drinking, telling stories and remembering.

Many who lived in New York in a state of exile, or who had lived alone with the trauma of the current intifada, found in the studio a place in which they felt safe from hostility and misunderstanding, in which they could share their thoughts and fears. A place of their own. They claimed this generic refugee tent and reconfigured it as a place not only of mourning and "working through," but of shelter and comfort. When the tent is shown now, Jacir says that it strikes her as "a relic, or a document of that period of time - of all those people, all the conversations, all those hands."

As a portable structure, the tent also calls attention to the displacement, not only of Palestinian people, but of their memories and histories. That displacement is explicit also in the abstracted names. For one thing, they are written in English. This is a work about exile, for those exiled. Jacir explains that, "many [Palestinians] who worked on the tent who were from the villages do not speak Arabic because they have lived here, and it is just as painful for them as it is for a refugee in Lebanon." The fear was also that, given the context of New York, had they been written in Arabic, they would solicit comments about the beauty of the script, undermining the pain and specificity of the work as a memorial.

Emily Jacir, Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948, 2001. Courtesy of Debs & Co.

It was also of vital importance to the artist that people say these names aloud and ask themselves why it is that they do not recognise them. They are names that have been erased from official Israeli history, a history that, in its expulsion of the Palestinians, repeats the act of dispossession—a history that Jacir contests. The act of writing these names and giving the piece the title, Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages That Were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948 conceptually reclaims lost territory. The names and title become a testimony, testifying, in their specificity, to the suppressed plight of the Palestinians. When the media decide to review the memorial, try as they might to neglect or distort that history, as Jacir says, "it's unavoidable, it's there in the title."

As a counterpoint to the 'solid wishes' of contemporary public memorials and monuments—such as Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, or Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe—which emphasise immutability and endurance, Jacir's memorial is temporary. In the artist's words, "the displacement is not permanent." One can't help thinking too, of all the Palestinian refugees (in 1948 there were nearly 800,000, now there are nearly 4 million) who fled their homes uttering the same words, "this is only temporary."

Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages is mobile and vulnerable—resisting any false appeals to closure. It is not a didactic monument, but a sensitive, painful testament to a desperate tragedy that needs to be addressed and aches to be mourned. The work was a collaborative stitching of a wound. Unlike other memorials that attempt to provide a fixed site for memory, or to embody it and therefore seal it from us, this piece disperses memory, allowing us various entrances. From Khalidi's book to Jacir's studio, from the stenciled names to the villages they denote, from individual trauma to shared experience, from the stitches to the hands that stitched them, and back again—somewhere within this complex woven fabric, memory has found a place.

The fragility of the refugee tent lays bare the fragility of our bodies—the fragility too, of memory. The inside of the tent is utterly, even painfully, naked. Loose threads hang down from the roof like limp body parts or strands of hair—moving evocations of physical and psychological injury. The stitching was not finished in time for the exhibition deadline. The making of the memorial was interrupted, echoing the interruption to the lives of those it remembers. The unfinished stitching reminds also of those moments of paralysis, escape and repression that intrude upon the process of working through. Jacir explains the significance of the incomplete quality of her memorial, "it was left unfinished, because quite simply, it is not finished." Her parents' generation had not yet begun to cope with the memory of 1948 when they lived through the 1967 war. Now they are horrified that Emily and her siblings are living the same trauma today. How does one deal with memory when the same damage is repeatedly re-inflicted? This is a work-in-progress; the process of remembrance and recovery has a long way to go.

This article is deeply indebted to Rebecca Faulkner's article, "Marked Space; Memorials and Memory" which appeared in the Spring edition of the British magazine 5 in 2002.