Mapping Dunes is a four-channel immersive video installation that follows a meditative, cyclical process of handmade paper-making. Stern filmed the video at the Tut Neyar Handmade Paper Studio in Zikhron Ya’akov—a family-run studio known for its fine paper and use of local plants in traditional techniques. Shirai Neumann, a member of the family, is featured in the video. The process she performs was created specifically for this work and is not part of her usual practice. Shirai appears here as a stand-in for the artist, Rae Stern—not as an actress, but as a fellow papermaker. Her practiced movements and natural rhythm as a trained and experienced papermaker offer an authentic record of the gestures each stage requires.

Across four synchronized screens surrounding the viewer, the papermaker gathers paper scraps from a dune-like pile, forms new sheets with specialized molds, compresses them in a traditional press, and hangs them to dry—only to tear them apart and begin again. Gradually, outlines of maps emerge in the drying paper, only to be destroyed and reformed—evoking the fragility and persistence of borders, memory, and the act of making.

The loop is endless, echoing both ongoing political instability and the cyclical nature of creative labor. Stern embedded personal elements throughout: a copper vessel passed down from her great-grandmother who had experienced several wars, a childhood mosaic bearing Stern’s Hebrew name, רעות, and books that shaped her early artistic imagination (Meir Shalev, Rene Magritte).

The idea for Mapping Dunes first took form in the summer of 2022 and the piece came together quickly. In many ways, the work now feels prophetic. Less than a year later, war erupted and borders were once again breached, altered, and fought over. Agreements shifted like dunes in the wind. buildings collapsed to piles of rubble and dust. The phrase “mapping dunes” became relevant again—no longer abstract, but chillingly precise.

Finally, what endures is not the objects or the documents, but the gesture—the quiet, persistent rhythm of undoing and remaking.