20th Anniversary Edition
by Raymond Prucher, Marcelo Guimarães Lima, and Etel Adnan
Jenin imPrints is a series of 18 images printed in 2004-2005 by Raymond Prucher. The series was originally exhibited in 2005 at the Bethlehem Peace Center in Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine. It was shown again in 2006, in Givors, France, in 6 graveurs at L’Auberge des Arts, Givors, France, concurrent to the publishing of the first edition of this book, published on Color Gang Édition by Yves Orly.
This 20th Anniversary Edition features a new cover, new foreward by Marcelo Guimarães Lima, Etel Adnan's English translation of her poem "Jenin", and a new poem by Raymond Prucher.
Fifty percent of proceeds will go to the registered nonprofit Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. Learn more about PCRF at PCRF.net — Thank you for your kind support.
Excerpt from the Foreward by artist and art historian, Marcelo Guimarães Lima:
"Raymond Prucher is a North-American artist, designer and poet who knows first-hand the people and places of Jenin and Palestine, having experienced life in occupied Palestine at different periods, witnessing oppression as daily life occurrences, as a kind of “generalized”, almost “normalized” condition. “Normalized” indeed from the point of view of the oppressors.
This series of artworks reflect, therefore, not just historical knowledge, awareness of the on-going history of our problematic times, but it is also an exercise in sympathy and care for those who suffer injustice in a world in which humanity's moral compass appears to have completely lost its ways and direction. It is an expression of empathy, loyalty and friendship from the distance, and yet with the closeness proper to the human spirit and the human heart as it manifests itself and recognizes itself across space and time.
These linoleum prints elaborate on photographic records of death and destruction in Jenin. Using with great ability elements of the graphic language of the linoleum print, the artist performs a kind of visual “epoché”, so to speak, a reduction to essentials, the visible essentials that can cut through layers of superfluous and distracting displays, and their related “narratives”, and provide us with a clear vision, a shining contemplation of the inner truth of what we see, of the truth proper to vision and the visible."
Excerpts from poems:
Jenin
- Etel Adnan, May 2002. Translated from the original French by Etel Adnan.
"There is something more reduced than death,
more absent, it’s that which has been wiped out
with a child’s eraser on History’s black-board.
History, the last illusion."
On a print by Raymond Prucher
- Marcelo Guimarães Lima
"These columns sustain
A dream of the land
This hard land where no fallen body can rest
There is no rest in the hard ground of Jenin"
Scene Seventy-Eight: Panopticon
- Raymond Prucher
"Fires throughout the marketplace,
In the camps. No flour. No bread.
Only the dead. Drowning.
Asphyxiating on earth, water, air, fire.
Choking on tongues and tears. On concrete and asphaltum.
Grief and silence."
Whimperbang Press publishes artist and literary books.
Launched in 2026, Whimperbang Press is an extension of whimperbang.com, an online literary journal founded and edited by Raymond Prucher. Our goal is to work with underrepresented communities, international creators, and early to mid-career authors and artists.