Maree Makom

You are viewing the pdf version of Maree Makom, the text underlying Once A Wall, or Ripple

Remains, a video installation by Tirtza Even. Where the pages are oversized in the pdf

rendering, they are folded in the print version. The book in its print form is not bound.

The pages are contained in a box as shown in the following page.

Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains:

Maree Makom

Tirtza Even

For Mohammed Laham

Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains

The identities of both nations involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict

rest on divided (i.e. partial) perspectives. The place—called Palestine

by some and Israel by others—is defined by the eyes that, from these

conflicting angles, see, remember, shape, destroy, deny it from each

other or claim it for themselves.

Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains is a multi-channel video installation

constituting the last fold of an on-going documentary project initially

produced in Palestine in 1998–99. The project spans more than eight

years as well as a wide range of media (from single-channel video,

CD-ROM, website, to written text and 3-D animation). The various

media incorporate and undermine each other’s reports, detecting

gaps, contradiction and preconception in the articulation of the primary

encounters that set the trail of records in motion. Together they form a

manifold document that questions the constancy of any perception or

rendering of such encounters.

In 1998–99 Bosmat Alon, an Israeli writer, and I embarked on a video

project, Kayam Al Hurbano (Existing On Its Ruins), that was intended

to provide a visual interpretation of dream-texts Alon had previously

written. The piece was shot in Deheishe, a refugee camp near

Bethlehem, and in demolished homes near Al-Khalil (Hebron).

Disjointed fragments of stories by individuals from these communities

were interwoven with the images shot, and were framed by one of

Alon’s texts.

Since our perspectives were not only those of outsiders depicting

an unfamiliar scene, but—as Israelis entering Palestine—of outsiders

implicated in other versions of aggression, occupation, usurpation,

in this secondary theft of representation and of images, the value

of the frame (as indicative of point of view) while recording this

encounter, became particularly charged. Our goal was to embed the

complexity of our position—as reaching out and invasive; as

empathetic and ignorant, shut out or closed off—in the visual and

audio characteristics of the people and places.

Two years after the completion of Kayam Al Hurbano 1 I returned to

the images imagined (“dreamt” or remembered), seen, shot and

digitally modified during the making of the piece, this time with Maree

Makom (i.e. reference mark, or literally, a view of a place), a written

text that wove these four states—projection, perception, framing,

manipulation—into a series of verbal snap shots.

The broad ethical/aesthetic attitude used in Kayam Al Hurbano—

an exploration of the meeting point between seeing and projecting,

finding and erasing–was made more nuanced in a verbal text that

could modulate between the various iterations of place and scene.

With a single stroke I was able to make and undo an image, fast

forward and leap backwards, trace a context and replace it. The

distinctions between found image and processed image collapsed

within the descriptions of single locales.

I wrote the text during 2002–2004 as a set of short paragraphs

that obliquely convey my autobiography as embedded in the images

I produced. The central event depicted, the making of the video

document, triggered in the text a complex and layered interplay

between the two iterations of the place—Israel on the one hand,

and Palestine on the other—as imagined, produced, seen and

remembered by the various characters. It is through views on

specific locations that the relationships between people (individuals

and groups) unfold.

The writing, that is, was engaged with what place retains, what it

witnesses; how it is longed for and lived through, contested,

constructed, evacuated and occupied; how it grows or deteriorates

in the eyes of the main figures: a pastoral valley seen through the

windows of a childhood home becomes a political murder scene; an

intimate walk on the beach transforms into a site of longing and

alienation when an Israeli soldier is spotted in the distance.

Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains, the last fold in this on-going project,

is my attempt to return to the haunting visual presence of the

documented images of Kayam Al Hurbano: images of kids playing

ball in the empty streets of Deheishe or of a woman serving tea in an

UNRA donated tent set next to her recently demolished home. Images

that were designed to interpret a verbal text, and that eventually were

themselves reiterated as—or within—verbal language.

The return I am seeking is one that incorporates these images’

passage through media—and through the history impacting their

perception—in their very display (the knowledge, for instance, of the

ensuing Uprising (Intifada) that has been responded to with further

acts of forceful containment such as the Apartheid Wall built to

physically divide the two nations, or Israel’s military assaults in Gaza

and Lebanon).

The piece consists of approximately thirty five scenes presented

simultaneously on individual screens in a gallery space. My intention

was to treat the text of Maree Makom as a series of staging

instructions, and with the aid of a 3-D animation software to mold the

original shots within a staged set that embodies the interruptions

depicted in the text. The camera navigating the 3-D environment

reveals the flatness of the image at the structure’s base and the

projected characteristics of the constructed site’s occupants: an

image of a couple walking on a beach is exposed with the turn of the

camera as assembled of two distinct scenes of individuals walking the

path alone; the structure containing children playing outdoors revolves

to reveal them as card-board silhouettes trapped within a twodimensional

plane. The fabricated landscape, that is, is exposed as

such: as alive, imagined and assumed as well as partitioned, distorted,

multiple and broken.

The story of Maree Makom (which underlies Once A Wall, or Ripple

Remains) centers around several characters, the main ones being

L., R., G., M., S., and H..

L., a video maker and R., a writer, both born and residing in Israel,

embark on a video project interpreting a set of dream like scenes

written by R., through the prism of the Palestine/Israel conflict. The

video is scheduled to be shown at a gallery based in Tel Aviv and

owned by G. under whose auspices, participation and support it is

made. M., S. (M.’s brother), and H. are Palestinian men who aid L.

and R. in the project. In addition to these six characters, an array of

anonymous figures are encountered and viewed in streets, through

windows, inside homes.

The specific places displayed both in the writing and in the video

installation include L.’s childhood home, embodying within it recalled

moments such as life in the shelter during the six day war; a

promenade by the beach in Tel Aviv where one of the video’s scenes is

shot, and where M. and L. are found sitting at a café during the video’s

final days of production; the gallery where the piece is screened, as

well as the Tel Aviv apartment in which it is edited.

Interspersed between these scenes is a more general series of images

of homes peeked at through windows extracted from an undefined

urban locale, where the texture of a mundane life lived beyond

imposed borders is maintained. This all alongside the images of the

Palestinian locations visited during the shooting of the video: a house

in mourning where the home-owners’ son has been stabbed to death

by an Israeli settler; homes demolished or threatened with demolition

by the Israeli military in Al-Khalil’s vicinity; the inhabited streets of a

refugee camp; impoverished structures of Bedouin camps, etc.

The text below includes those paragraphs from Maree Makom which

were visually interpreted within Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains,

alongside still images extracted from the video/animation scenes.

1. Two subsequent iterations of that same project were produced soon after

(Occupied Territory, an interactive CD-ROM version and a website

encompassing also an archive of letters and images from readers).

Between Then and Now

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Past

Play

Flag

Stain

Sea

Anger

Silence

Pictures

Archive

Map

Building

Partition

Lock

Erasure

Record

Invisible

Conversation

Twice

Now

Between Language and Image

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

Language

Waiting

Picture

Bulldozed

Eye to Eye

Window

Voices

Broken

Meeting

Translated

Stone

Image

Between a Memory and the End

A Memory

Shelter

Raw

Mound

Abandoned

Inside

Departure

Dead End

Distance

End

Between Then and Now

Past

The road leading down from the museum plaza

towards the valley was paved and as steep as L.

needed it to be. Y., who stood at the bottom of the

asphalt path, watchfully monitored the child’s

figure sliding down the slope on a pair of new

metal skates tightened with two red straps. They

had no apparent witnesses, and what remained

from that par ticular moment was only a somewhat

dusty memor y, from a single angle, of an

exceptionally bright autumn sky, of a private path,

green-grey and clean, in which was absorbed the

absolute-solemn quiet of the one day a year when

playing in the middle of the street is allowed and

is even suggested, and of the concentrated care

that was dedicated there, at the valley’s edge, to

the realization of a dream.

Recalled Location

Jerusalem, birth town and childhood home

to L.

Valley of the Cross, a park adjacent to Y.’s

and L.’s apartment house on Tshernichovsky

Street. The park is owned by a monastery

located at its center, and is framed by the

Israel Museum on one side and Israel’s

Parliament building on the other.

Low bushes and olive trees

Recalled Time

1970. Yom Kippur. Jewish day of Fast

Jerusalem’s streets are generally

vacant. No cars can be seen.

Characters

Y. - L.’s father

Young L.

Play

A small number of kids freeze in place with

rocks in their hands. Wahad Tnen Talate Samak

Mumluach (“One Two Three Salt-Fish”). M. excited,

scrupulously oversees the rules. Wahad Tnen

Talate Samak Mumluach. He turns around releasing

the kids’ brisk hand gesture and the body springing

forward, towards the camera. Just outside the

perimeter of that same image lie broken scaf foldings

and the remainders of a barbed wire fence under

piles of sand and gravel; almost visible also are

the white stone monument for the camp’s martyrs,

the bullet-ripped flag hanging on the electricity

pole to the right, and a grey outline of the sewage

funneling down from the roots of all the alleys

winding toward Bethlehem Way. The kids follow

the rules. The rock, between one paralyzing cr y to

the nex t, is picked up, raised and eventually put

down carefully on the pile growing at the center of

the court-yard; here too marking a border, like the

small mounds of stones in the abandoned fields

the blue car has passed along the outskirts of

Hebron/Al-Khalil.

Video Recording Site

An open courtyard in Deheishe, a refugee

camp near Bethlehem, established in 1948 as

temporary housing for 3,000 refugees, and

occupied today by about 12,000 people living

in less than one square kilometer

Video Recording Occasion

1998. Initial production days of a video piece

by L. and R. where dream-texts written by

R. are used as scripts for scenes shot in

Palestine/Israel. The piece is made under the

auspices of G., the owner of an art gallery in

the south of Tel Aviv.

The rules of the game (“Salt Fish”) played and

shot in the courtyard:

One person, the caller, repeatedly turns his/her

back to a group of participants. While his/her

back is turned the players are allowed to move

forward (arriving at the caller’s location is their

goal). Occasionally the caller declares “one,

two, three, salt fish” and turns to face the

group. At that point all movement must freeze.

In the current game version a goal is added:

The players, holding rocks in their hands, aim

to assemble a tall pile of rocks at the caller’s

feet, simulating the icon of a boundary marker

frequently used by Palestinian farmers.

Participants

M. - A Palestinian man residing in Deheishe

who is aiding the two women in the making of

their piece

Several kids from the camp recruited to

participate in the staging and videotaping of

the scene

L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv

R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem

Flag

On one of the rear apar tment balconies in

Florentine, Tel Aviv, in the humid heat of a brightly

lit summer day, within which a red sun will soon

sink heavily, an ordinar y old woman stands/leans

for three full hours, partly hidden behind a grease

stain on the curtained glass door in the apartment

in the building opposite it. Over her head, from the

cross-bar set above the open black doorway

behind her, a blurr y white piece of cloth is waving

in the hot wind. As a result of an error in an

obstinate editing program a few months later, in

the same small apartment in the building across,

that sun-scorched, worn rag will dance and fidget

fitfully, and the image will suddenly revolve around

the white flag as an axis. In the meanwhile,

however, the eye follows the slow dissolve in the

face of the woman who will walk wearily along the

crumbling cement railing, and will disappear there

beyond the picture’s rim again and again.


Florentine, a working class neighborhood in

the south of Tel Aviv

Low three-four story cement apartment

buildings housing foreign workers side by side

with older local residents and a growing young

artists’ community


1998. Unstructured assembly of scenes from

the neighborhood’s life

Participants

Aging woman on balcony

L. - An Israeli videographer. At the time in

which the scene is taking place, L. is residing

in a three-room apartment across from the

depicted building.

Stain

When his turn arrived, the only man in the group

went to the star ting point, and walked for ward as

well, a large anonymous black stain, becoming

more and more detailed as he approached the

three women, dark skinned, with a moustache,

peacefully strolling on the shore in an early evening

hour of a Tel Aviv weekday, along an invisible route

about two steps to the left of the one sketched

earlier by a bright woman in sky-blue dress and

smooth brown hair, and unknowingly formed an

almost-double for M., who, several months later,

curled up, he and his brother, in the back seat of a

dusty blue Peugeot with a yellow Israeli plate, will

be brought into a city he knows only through the

foreign words of a Hebrew writer by the name of

Agnon he has recited since the prison years in

Ktsioot, and who will walk there too, along that

same path, drunk to tears from the scent of

the sea.


Tel Aviv seashore promenade

Wide paved sidewalk stretching along the

coast, parallel to the beach sand on the one

side, and the cafes and hotel buildings on

the other





Palestine/Israel.

The current staged scene is designed to

interpret a dream-text in which the possibility

of a random connection between a Palestinian

fighter and an Israeli woman is hinted at,

longed for, and ultimately dissipated by

mutual distrust.

Participants

Moustached man

Woman in bright dress



Character Alluded to

M. - A Palestinian man residing in Deheishe

refugee camp who is aiding the two women in

the making of their piece

Sea

Not far from there, one cloudy evening, on two

plastic chairs buried deep in the dir ty sand in

which bare toes are burrowing to soak up the day’s

heat, when the fresh scent of salt mixes with the

fumes of hot milk and the sweetness of coffee in

the tall cracked glass mugs, and grains of sea-salt

grate in the mouth with each bite of the juicy red

watermelon; and when the caressing, free, summer

breeze stirs memories of youth and effervescence,

and a momentary promise of friendship and of

love, M. told (longing precisely for this sandy

landscape of L.’s, and perhaps also for the initial,

cleansing hunger itself, for the days when the

anger was younger and sharper, and fatigue and

resignation haven’t yet worn it out—as well as the

words and gestures it rested on) the story of the

long years in prison, and of the blinding violent

dream that preceded them.

Recalled Location

Tel Aviv seashore, parallel to the promenade

shot in the previous scene

Small cafes are scattered along the shore,

where people are served light food while

seated on plastic chairs set in the sand by

the water.

Recalled Time

1998. Final production days of a video piece



Palestine/Israel.

Characters

M. - A Palestinian man living in Deheishe who

is aiding the two women in the making of

their piece


And after a long hour, when the voices had ebbed,

and the absolute, painful rupture that was exposed

there for a moment between two worlds was sewn

up, they walked away from the plastic chairs now

locked in metal chains for the night, toward the

salt water puddles in which the world, flushed,

was reflected upside-down; drawn by the music

emerging from one of the halls at the periphery of

the Dolphinarium.

Anger

In the first visit to the mourning house in Al-Khalil,

an Arab girl reciting words of rage was videotaped

without sound, her round open face filling the

entire picture. What remained outside the frame,

and beyond the screeching stillness of the sight of

the full lips moving incessant and fast, and the

strained neck upright and stiff in the childish collar

of the black and white uniform, was the automatic

hand gesture of the visiting Israeli delegation’s

leader, towards the shoulder of a crying father,

grasping it with five dry and narrow fingers,

suspending the moment for a photograph that was

never taken, and in some internal undetectable

slap, shoving the grieving man’s pain to his lips,

which are now waking up-contorted, recognizing

the metal eye staring from the room’s other end.

And yet the eye is concentrated on the silence of

the orphan’s voice that is emerging still, and that

will emerge ever since, from the video screen.


Al-Khalil. A house in mourning

The home-owners’ son has been stabbed to

death by an Israeli settler several days prior

to the recorded visit.



by L. and R.

Participants

Young girl - daughter of the deceased

A delegation from Israel consisting of

representatives from various peace

movements

A delegation from Palestine, among which is

present H., a resident of Al-Khalil and an

Al-Khalil municipality engineer, who will soon

begin aiding the two women in the making of

their piece

Family members



Silence

Daylight was almost gone when the three began

the trip back from Tel Aviv to the refugee camp,

silent now, and in them still churning the warmth

of the first embrace and of the hand damp with

sweat; stirring also with the memory of the bitternauseating

taste of a baked fish in a rocking

boat-restaurant on the water of the small reeking

bay behind the walls of old Jaffa, and with the

residue of insult from the impatience of the visitors

who remained back there, in G.’s gallery, buried,

guilty, under the weight of the refugee camp’s

pictures that gazed at them in the dark room,

within the enchanted-pulsating, the lit city that is

receding again from a cherished here and now to

the foreign and my thical. M. sat in front and L. was

driving. M’s brother was quiet in the back seat,

recalling the stone shelves loaded with books in

the first Jewish apar tment he walked into without

construction-work clothes. When they reached

the road-block M. pulled out his glasses and put

them on, embarrassed, blinking at the soldier who

was inspecting the blue Peugeot with weary

indifference.

Recalled Location

The road leading from Tel Aviv to Deheishe, a

refugee camp near Bethlehem

G.’s gallery, a non-profit art center located in


Recalled Time

1999. The opening screening night of a video

piece by L. and R. In the piece, dream-texts

written by R. are used as scripts for scenes

shot in Palestine/Israel. The project is made

under the auspices of G., the owner of the

gallery, and on its completion is screened

there nightly for a month.

Characters


is aiding the two women in the making of their

piece, and who is present at the gallery’s

opening night

S. - M’s brother


Pictures

R. dreamt colorful and concrete dreams. They were preserved in her memory detailed and

sharp for years, subject to a succinct formulation. A web of contexts and a complex system

of paradoxes, idiosyncratic or general, found expression in them. More than once some friend,

as well as she herself, would try to give one of the internal images she had painstakingly

gathered and kept in an overflowing archive of dreams, a new context or meaning. But the

dreams, in the obstinacy and closure of a live organ, refused to serve as an allegory. And yet,

when the idea came up to reenact the dream scenes in the Occupied Territories, a new attempt

was made.

Archive

H. is standing behind the visiting delegation’s

principal. His features are blurry in the white light

washing-obliterating the crowd huddled within the

room. A tall man, grey, slightly bent, the look in his

eyes, which will stir up and reawaken in the hot air

of the rocky hills to which a few hours later he, R.

and L. will escape, away from the suffocating grief,

is faded and heav y lidded still over the black

mustache. The dim motivation for his action, within

which was tucked a concealed desire for a goal

that would free him from a two year wait for a

house the completion of which cannot be funded,

and for a wife who got up one day af ter bearing

him eleven daughters and only one son, and

returned to her mother’s home, impelled him to

move, tall and promising, from one house-in-need

to the ruins of another, surrounded from all sides

by rings of anxiety and despair, scribbling numbers

on tattered shreds of paper which will pile on

others like them in his of fice in Al-Khalil’s

municipality building: a measurement of a beloved

piece of land destroyed today by a bulldozer, or

the number of uprooted olive trees marked on a

scrap torn from a map.


Al-Khalil. A house in mourning

The home-owners’ son has been stabbed to

death by an Israeli settler several days prior to

the recorded visit.

Demolished homes in Al-Khalil surroundings


1998. Initial production days of the video piece

by L. and R.

Participants

H. - A resident of Al-Khalil and an Al-Khalil

municipality engineer, who is aiding the two

women in the making of their piece

A delegation from Israel consisting of

representatives from various peace

movements

A delegation from Palestine

Family members



Map

When they were finally released af ter six joy ful

days, the children discovered that the walls of the

third floor in the façade of the building in

Tshernichovsk y Street were pierced with bullet

holes. Amplifying the dark and solemn adventure

in the crowded shelter were also the paper birds

that someone, in those long and strange and

excited days, had taught them how to fold so that

the wings would flap with the pull of a tail; and the

mystery of the sacks of sand below the ladder

leading from Y.’s garden to the window; sacks

which will rot there many years later, turning brown

from cat piss, from oil and humidity and from the

grains of sand that would burst through the

crumbling cloth. Inside, on the rickety armchairs

and the heap of mattresses laid out hurriedly on

the dusty floor, gathered all the neighbors except

for the one who has just been recruited. Their

faces worried and animated, they clustered around

V.’s portable radio which still divided the world, in

absolute innocence, into them and us, ours and

theirs. And all the death that will enter that home,

and the entropy, the bushes withering, the grass

spotted with dandelions that will wilt and dry; the

childish writing etched on a back drawer in a

wooden wardrobe that will crack with time and

eventually be replaced (“mine. secret. pliz do not

open”); the dread of the sting of a creature fluttering

in the sun, and of a thick voice rising from private

depths, paralyzing, and stifling thought; the warm

loaf of bread the inside of which, doughy and

moist, was hollowed out in rushed forbidden

plucks, the crispy crust shoved hurriedly into a

shabby leather school bag; the proud insult from a

cruel prank, and an everlasting friendship sealed

in blood on a piece of paper buried deep in a bottle

behind the thorny bush in the backyard, to the left

of the rusty structure for hanging laundry, from

which kids also dangled when grown-ups weren’t

watching. All that innocence, into which year after

year the truths nibbled, stealthily creeping, or

suddenly bursting in: a motorbike accident, a

divorce, the death of a father and a mother’s

bereavement. And the slow, accruing knowledge

that we were wrong, that we had committed a

crime; and the heroic reverie that turned sour and

black. Did it all begin then?

Recalled Location

L.’s childhood apartment house on

Tshernichovsky Street, Jerusalem

Recalled Time

1967. The Six Day War

An armed conflict between Israel and the

Arab states of Egypt, Jordan and Syria in

which the portion of Palestine known as the

“Occupied Territories” was conquered by the

Israeli Army

Characters

Y. – L.’s father

V. – A resident of the Tshernichovsky Street

apartment house. Close to twenty years after

the recalled scene, just prior to the first

Palestinian Intifada (Uprising), V. will be

stabbed to death by two Palestinian men

when walking to work through the Valley of

the Cross.

Young L.

Building

Suddenly a balloon appears out of nowhere, in the

hub of a city bubbling with light and sound, passing

by a TV flickering indifferently through a wide

window in a high-rise building. For a long moment

the T V is flickering-broken, the image in it split

horizontally by a thick black band: the forehead of

a plump man is visible below and his neck above.

The source of the arm which eventually reaches

out to the machine, and turns it slightly to the

right, is unseen. In an adjacent window a pair of

woman’s legs in almost transparent pantyhose

lean over a laundry bag, a hand leafs through the

pile of white fabric, and the legs recede towards

what is now comprehended as a door, a bright

partition which divides the screen into one third

on the left and two thirds on the right. From there

a cut occurs/is made to a third window frame,

within which stands a silhouette of a man hunched

old, staring at us blind and slow, and which in

endless motion leans on the sill, wipes a nose,

turns back and is finally submerged in the warm

yellow light that a round lamp on a table

corner sheds.


Apartment building in a large city, perhaps

New York, perhaps Tel Aviv


1998. An assembly of window scenes shot at

nighttime in a variety of urban settings

Characters

Anonymous

Partition

In one of those abandoned fields, behind the row

of bald hills toward which the highway is wellpaved

only up to the juncture of the road leading

to the ugly stone houses with the jutting red roofs

of the nearby Jewish settlement, stands a singlestory

cement structure. The edge of a thin flowery

mattress is visible at the entrance to the back

room, and half of the rectangle of a window. In the

front room four men are waiting. The three young

ones are leaning over the coal-black mouth of an

oven built of earth upon which an ornamented

copper cof feemaker is heating. The four th man, an

older Bedouin in white jellaba, toward whom H.’s

questions are addressed, is sitting cross legged

slightly further away under a high porthole only

hinted at by a diagonal ray of light breaking on the

ground below it. The old man’s murmurs persist

even while the eye stumbles upon the narrow

handsome and sealed features of the lef t-most

man looking beyond and over the camera, his eyes

sharp and refusing contact, the rage blockedclenched

in them, folded burning and inactive like

his body, or the dark pair of hands cuppinglocking

the face of the barefoot teen resting to

his right on a dusty wooden case.


Al-Khalil surroundings. A Bedouin tribe

settlement


1998. Production of a video piece by L. and R.

Participants




Four Bedouin men from the visited tribe



Lock

A complex code embedded in an editing software

is slicing the image of the woman on the balcony

of the building across into brief slivers: a series of

single frames from an early moment is intermittently

woven within a second series of frames from a

later moment. The old woman’s wear y motion

forward is withheld, is repeated and thwarted,

suggesting at times protest and at times surrender,

and always the personal fabricated projection of

the artist, who inhibits, erases and stages anew

that long moment and that old woman, behind the

stain of grease on the cur tained glass door: it is

three bored hours now that L. is bent over the lens

inside a living room painted airy white, upon the

car ved stone shelves of which are resting dozens

of the books that survived from Y.’s study, before

everything left there was thrown sold given away.





buildings housing foreign workers side by side

with older local residents and a growing young

artists’ community




Participants

Aging woman on balcony


which the scene is taking place L. is residing

in a three-room apartment across from the

depicted building.

Character alluded to

Y. - L.’s deceased father

Erasure

At a sharp angle from Jaffa Gate, a one-way deadend

side street slopes up towards Z’s home. Z., on

the roof, is standing in front of a wooden easel,

the light falling on her brown knit dress dusky and

soft, mixed with an almost imperceptible breeze

that only the motion of the cloth hanging on a nylon

cord stretched from the roof’s entrance betrays.

The drawing—which would form slowly on the flat

page, and which will be erased one day in a video

projection played in reverse, freeing and cruel, of

the entire recorded ef for t, and of the setting sun

(that will now rise), darkening (brightening) the

place until the drawing will lose its detail; a

projection backwards that will draw-in the scene

toward the utter blankness that preceded the first

green mark made there on that page—is of

Rapunzel, who was released from the high tower

in which she was imprisoned, with the aid of her

long hair that served her as a black and thick

braided rope to hang from, and escape.


Z.’s rooftop apartment in the old city

of Jerusalem





Palestine/Israel.

The current scene is an attempt to interpret a

dream-text concerned with the immediacy

and availability of escape inherent—yet

unnoticed—within what on the surface seem

to be systematically imprisoning settings.

Participants

Z. - A Palestinian artist living and working in

Jerusalem. Rapunzel’s story and character is a

repeated motif in Z.’s drawings.



Record

Through a square orange window a woman in a

red hair-cover is seen, pacing meticulously in a

room in which only that square fraction of an

orange wall is revealed. At one point she emerges

with the tip of a pole that she moves back and

for th in a sweeping motion; later she disappears

under the windowpane’s frame and in her place

comes into view a huge brown shadow of a

distorted figure sitting on a stool, bent forward.

And then again she stands precisely in front of the

glass, in her hand a rag, scrubbing the imperceptible

sur face separating us over and over. The cut at

the end of the recorded movement is concealed

when the shot is attached anew to its beginning,

thus leaving the woman there in front of us,

cleaning and wiping the invisible stain, time and

again, forever.







Characters

Anonymous

Invisible

On the other side of the small grey mosque in the

entrance of which the elders are standing, and in

front of which the blue Peugeot, covered with a

blanket of dust and sand, is parked, and not far

from the militar y base betrayed by the tall antennas

protruding from the heart of the barren hills, a

small group of young men and children is clustered

under a roofed structure exposed to the light

scorching white at its rim. On a thin blood-purple

striped mattress sits a child about ten years old,

in a grey T-shir t and faded jeans, his back facing

the camera and his head buried between his knees.

Around his finger is wound a long black thread the

edge of which is hanging loose from the cloth

covering the structure, and it is pulled/released

from the fabric once, and then again, coiling some

and then some more, and letting go.

them like dr y fabric. Within the flurr y of voices now

flooding the entire mountain it is only possible to

decipher the fingers pointing excitedly out into the

white sea within which two tall antennas are

swimming, two black lines dancing-coiling in the

feverish heat.



settlement


1998. Production of a video piece by L.

and R.

Characters

L. – An Israeli videographer residing in

Tel Aviv

R. – An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem

Anonymous

Around the boy, and over him, a conversation

heats up with rage and hur t: stray bullets pass

screeching over heads of children playing in the

thorny bushes; clouds of dust soar up from

cemetery bricks shattered to pieces; olive trees a

hundred years old strike the ground painfully, their

roots—to which clumps of dry earth are still clinging

—hang in the air. The words erupt. The hands are

waving with hate and impotence. But R. and L.

understand nothing. The Arabic rips the air around

Conversation

When the two shots will be interwoven, that of the

moustached man, M.’s twin, with that of the woman

in summer dress who is walking like him, idly, on

the paved asphalt path along a pulsating Tel Aviv

beach, and will be pasted-assembled as planned,

the first over the second (by means of elementary

digital video editing tools) into a single new image,

it would seem to the viewers that the two, indeed

semi-transparent, are nonetheless walking side by

side, silent. And yet on the brink of stepping out,

crossing the frame of the image toward the hidden

place in which the dreamer and camera are waiting

for them, the woman will suddenly take a quick

pace forward, passing her companion, and for one

brief moment the place would be occupied by both

of them, their bodies intersecting within a single

solid, clashing, presence, before they will each

slide, almost transparent again, past the edges of

the screen.


Tel Aviv seashore promenade

Wide paved sidewalk stretching along the

coast, parallel to the beach sand on the one

side, and the cafes and hotel buildings on

the other





Palestine/Israel.

The current scene is designed to interpret a

dream-text in which the possibility of a random

connection between a Palestinian fighter and

an Israeli woman is hinted at, longed for, and

ultimately dissipated by mutual distrust.

Participants

Moustached man

Woman in bright dress

L. – An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv

R. – An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem

Twice

T., a scrawny man, stooped like a porter, his words

sharp and his story flowing bright in broken,

borrowed, Hebrew, is married to K., whose hair is

young and light, her eyes wrinkled and her quick

smile toothless. The color of the UN Relief Agency’s

donated tent, in which they are sitting, is olive

green like the enemy’s uniform, and around it lie

fallen bricks and lumps of broken cement out of

which coil twisted metal snakes. From a small

porthole cut in the backside of the tent, and from

its front opening, intermittent-kids are peeping.

K.’s hands know them by rote, and they delouse

their hair and wipe their noses on their own accord,

letting her eyes wander through the guests.

But just then the image is replaced, confused. And

here they all are again, sitting in the only cement

structure now left in the bulldozers’ flattened trail,

upon which several months later—or did this

perhaps already take place?—the iron bar will

swing and rip the house’s skin and crush its

foundations. The voices, as before, are alive and

effervescent, including that of T., who has just

returned from jail a few days ago, a bit thinner and

further stooped, his tongue agile and warm still

and bubbling with images, indulging in the texture

of the visiting filmmakers’ language, the language

also of those who uprooted his house.


Al-Khalil surroundings. A demolished home of

a Palestinian family

18,000 Palestinian homes have been

destroyed by Israel since 1967. The IDF carries

out three types of house demolitions: ‘Clearing

operations,’ which are intended to meet what

Israel defines as ‘military needs’; Administrative

demolitions of houses built without a permit;

And house demolitions intended to punish the

relatives and neighbors of Palestinians who

carried out or are suspected of involvement in

attacks against Israeli civilians or soldiers 1 .



The majority of the scenes are shot in

Deheishe, a refugee camp, and in demolished

homes or homes about to be demolished in

the vicinity of Al-Khalil.

Participants

T. and his wife K. - Residents of a home at the

outskirts of Al-Khalil. T. and K.’s home has

been twice demolished by the Israeli Army

under the pretext of the absence of a permit.

Their land ownership documents date to the

Turkish Occupation period (prior the

constitution of the Israeli state in 1948).



1. Through No Fault of Their Own,Nov. 15, 2004, B’Tselem Publications

Now

And then, one moment, the picture stops breathing. The soundtrack is already fused with the

noise of the place, and the life it holds suddenly flattens and halts. From a distance of years

the Hebrew that accompanies the sights, whispering beneath them, recedes now or breaks in a

shriek. And the memory which is attempting to haul up an echo, drops down like a leaf in a New

York red autumn wind, slightly this way, and slightly that way, swinging, falling, and is finally

trampled under the indifferent heel of a new moment rushing—shoving and being shoved—in.

Between Language and Image

Language

The short paragraphs were already typed in the right column of a printed chart, in the left

column of which L. and R. now needed to write a fitting visual interpretation to the dream

texts that would guide the video recording in Al-Khalil and in the refugee camp. And so, with

an enthusiasm that will soon be redirected, refined, deepened and ultimately paralyzed by the

encounter with the despair and dream of those whose image was as yet still compliant and

malleable—before, that is, R.’s texts were altogether discarded and abandoned—the following

few sentences were scribbled:

Duchamp’s door (close=open)

A projection backwards of a building being destroyed

Stones being thrown / marking a border (the game of Salt Fish)

Birds flying backwards

A prohibition to look up

A huge expanse is a small expanse (far=near)

The act of drawing videotaped and then projected backwards

Reverse the cutting of Möbius strips

A shadow not yours. A reflection without a source

Waiting

Waiting

It is two o’clock. The camp’s grey-dusty alleys are

searing. Here and there a plastic bag rolls empty

in the wind, or lies bloated in a sewage puddle,

inhaling its final bubbles of air. On a crumbling

cement stair, in front of a tin door red from rust

and stained with paint and jotted words that are

only visible in part within the picture’s range, sits

a bearded man in a frayed yellow-grey jacket and

washed-out cloth pants, on his head a round cap,

and in his fingers a cigarette butt he is smoking

slowly. In front of him, in the sun, a set of scales

sway to and fro in the light breeze, two green

plastic buckets balanced on a dirty metal axis,

swinging lazily up and down, up and down—the

moment is long, hot, and still.


Deheishe, a refugee camp near Bethlehem,

established in 1948 as temporary housing for

3,000 refugees, and occupied today by about

12,000 people living in less than one square

kilometer



and R.

Characters

Anonymous

Picture

In the nex t day’s newspaper a space was dedicated

to the photograph of the terrible moment of the

discovery, the mute print of V.’s wife’s heartpiercing

cr y, leaning over her husband’s body, in

crumbling-grainy white and grey, under the

shadows of the ancient olive trees on the dir t path

surrounding the monastery, at the edge of the

Valley of the Cross. A slice of the valley was visible

through ever y back window in the building on

Tshernichovsky Street. The picture was stretched,

taut like a canvas on an easel, over the frame of

those windows. Sheep and goats climbed within it

up white rocks until the day they suddenly stopped

appearing, giving room to a trail of bulldozers

that gnawed on the hill’s dust, and then to a

black asphalt road that ripped and slit the

painting open.

Recalled Location

Valley of the Cross, a park adjacent to L.’s

childhood apartment house on Tshernichovsky

Street, Jerusalem. The park is owned by a

monastery located at its center, and is framed

by the Israel Museum on one side and Israel’s

Parliament building on the other.

Recalled time

1986. Murder of V., L.’s neighbor, by two

Palestinian men on his way to work through

the Valley of the Cross

The event took place on the eve of the first

Palestinian Intifada (Uprising). The Intifada

(1987–1993) involved demonstrations, strikes,

riots and violence in protest against the Israeli

occupation and politics, and was carried out

both in the Gaza Strip and on the West Bank.

Characters

V. and his wife - Residents of the

Tshernichovsky Street apartment house

Bulldozed

H., on a dry, rocky piece of ground, is holding a

creased map upon which are marked in handwriting

the boundaries of the destroyed structure on his

left. The sun is pointed on his forehead, and the

skies, in clean open blue, draw a sharp outline

around the bowed shoulders, the high brow, the

long fingers shielding the gaze. Behind him, in the

blinding light, a long brick fence leads straight into

the picture’s horizon, and standing on it, black

against the blue sky, is a slim silhouette of a child,

the son of the land’s owner, at his feet a torn

shopping bag made of porous blue plastic through

which the grey of a rock appears. The mumble of

the scorched voice of the father instructing the

three guests though the details of the arid, arbitrar y

violence of the law, of the day’s events, surges

and ebbs. The anger is dry, parched, echo-less.

Above it, beyond the murmur of the weary words,

the measurements, the numbers, on the stone

brick fence cutting into the heart of the image,

moves the boy’s body, indifferent and apart.

Trapped in a slowed down, melting time, he turns

an endless turn, his gaze sliding into ours, mute

and black, and halts there. Eye to eye.


Demolished house at the outskirts of Al-Khalil



out three types of house demolitions: “Clearing

operations,” which are intended to meet

what Israel defines as “military needs;”

Administrative demolitions of houses built

without a permit; and house demolitions

intended to punish the relatives and neighbors

of Palestinians who carried out or are

suspected of involvement in attacks against

Israeli civilians or soldiers 1 .







Participants




Demolished home owner and his son



1. Through No Fault of Their Own,Nov. 15, 2004, B’Tselem Publications

Eye to Eye

And at the left corner of that same exposed

structure, across from the old mosque out of which

several slender figures in black robes will soon

emerge, is a window-opening, carved in stone.

The edges of the window are rough and its outline

approximate, arching under a faded piece of

cur tain-cloth. A pair of black eyes, and a sof t

cheek reflecting white light, peer under a fold in

the heavy fabric, along which is stitched a snaky

scar, the light wrinkling into it, trapped. Slowly—

the motion in the image hardly discernable—a split

is marked in the shot, a fracture in the cameragaze

itself. One portion of the view is kept fixed

while the other draws towards the childish

sweetness collected under the raised rim of the

fabric, caressing the delicate round features which

are now moving for ward, enlarged. The surrounding

wall remains rigid and opaque.



settlement



and R.

Characters

Anonymous

Window

A flickering wave of blue-red light, emerging

hypnotic from a hidden corner in the room’s

interior, surges over the two eyes seen through the

window shutter cracks. Accompanying the flood of

lights is a metallic whisper of voices drowned in

the thunder of a barrage of gunfire intermingled

with a gloomy tune. In the adjacent apar tment two

hands are folding a tablecloth. They spread the

cloth wide through the window’s perforated lace

curtain, shaking-straightening the soft wrinkles.

Square and smooth in the pink light, the fabric

falls, fold into tidy fold, one last gentle pat flattening

a cloth-bubble, and it disappears on a dark shelf.

Immediately, responding to a rhythm that the

editing of the long minutes is attentive to, from the

rim of another window frame, leaps a black cat

onto a sill. The light in the room recedes, reddens,

and is veiled by a silhouette of a woman, who in a

decisive sweep hurls the animal of f, and closes

the window with a thump.







Characters

Anonymous

Voices

12:10 They say we steal water that belong them.

13:00 We here live by Turkish law, father and grandfather and father grandfather also.

18:10 They came four Jewish people broke all the trees.

21:44 In the night when he is sleep suddenly he gets up screams: they want destroy us house.

Why dream this? It is moving in his blood.

25:07 We don’t know to which government we are.

Broken

Short image slivers glimmer on the screen again,

broken video phrases—a man leaning on a window

sill, a woman cleaning a glass pane, a cat climbing

on a ledge—the already familiar moments clasp

one another, interrupt one another, weighing on

the eye with the persistent rhy thmic bombardment

that is imposed on them, bursting the warm calm

permeating them, pressing the surface of the one

window framing all three, inwards, towards a new

space, deep, temporary, that occurs between

them, through the dance created among the

gesture of the hand wiping, the hand leaning, the

hand shoving, the hand wiping. Three motions

extending towards each other, meeting at the

border line differentiating between the imprint of

the one moment on the eye’s retina and the imprint

lef t by the nex t, at the hear t of the flicker, within

which is retained an absolute silence this time, like

the one contained in the long freezing siren of

memorial and mourning days.







Characters

Anonymous

Meeting

Under that same white summer light, the thumps

of the wind on the microphone flattening the

tex ture of his voice and blurring his words, T. is

resting on the one wall that remained standing

among the splinters of glass and torn cables,

emerging whole and upright from within the

bulldozer-trodden ground.

A month ago I completed t wo years and t wo months

in prison. I sent my family my children more than a

hundred letters. They sent me back two. So they

would come visit me. I said to them “ why don’t you

send me letters?” They said “how could we write you,

what will we write?” My eldest daughter said “what do

I remember, I remember nothing. I feel that you are

another person. Not my father.”

these long hours, staring at a picture of a small

child poking out of a window that an alley winding

up the refugee camp is leading to, his body inside

and his legs dancing in the street, teasing a second

boy who is hopping towards them, reaching with

his hand out, struggling to catch.

Always, all the time, I feel guilty. And my house, I feel

all the time, is not natural.

T.’s voice refuses to cease. The translated text of

the words drifts over the picture, streams under

the kid’s gleeful feet, and slides out.


First scene: Al-Khalil surroundings. A

demolished home of a Palestinian family

Second scene: Deheishe refugee camp



and R.

Participants

T. - Resident of a home at the outskirts

of Al-Khalil. T.‘s home has been twice

demolished by the Israeli Army under the

pretext of the absence of a permit. His land

ownership documents date to the Turkish

Occupation period (prior the constitution of

the Israeli state in 1948).



Anonymous

The sentences scatter, broken, down the valley,

rolling towards the by-pass road that ravages the

ancient olive tree groves, and bursts through the

stone fence into T.’s land plot.

Twenty six months I haven’t seen them at all. I walked

into the house. My son said “Mother, there is

somebody come and we don’t know who he is.”

The letters rush for ward, tinted yellow they cross

the small screen upon which R. and L. are leaning

Translated

The tent of the Bedouin woman is set up on the

hill, below a fortified stone structure owned by a

man called U. whose tiny silhouette, beyond the

barbed wire surrounding his house, is inspecting

the tall man and the three women standing nex t to

him. Behind the four figures, under a long laundry

cable and an assortment of fabrics waving red, the

valley spreads out wide and open in shades of

brown and bright green, and folding deep into it

are also thin grey shadow wrinkles creasing the

dry earth from the head of the mountain to the

hear t of the gorge. The guests, holding tall glasses

stained by a residue of sweet sticky tea, are

listening to their host, her large body in a blackknitted

jellaba, her voice expanding upwards,

there, on the hill, many days before the sound

track of H.’s sober voice will accompany it,

staggering, streaming low below the woman’s

absolute cry with an improvised translation into

broken English in which he will emphasize the

moral and the heroic:


Al-Khalil surroundings. A Bedouin tent



A Bedouin woman reporting an attack by a

settler (U.) residing on a hill overlooking her

tent

Participants

Bedouin woman

U. - Settler






Before two nights, one settler, his name is U., came

from here, tried to attack this woman at night, and he

took his weapon, and said I want to kill you, but she

took a stone and she said to him, you have a weapon

but I have another weapon. If you try to kill me, I want

to kill you with this stone.

Stone

Upon a barrel of cement standing on a half-built

roof a man rests for his evening smoke. His gaze

gathered inward and his hand limp, he absentmindedly

scrapes the roof’s floor, back and forth,

with a grey pebble, the light behind him flooding

the concrete and plaster with murky rusty red.

Beyond the electricity line slumped from the edge

of a metal pole, and which curves-softens the hard

geometry of the image, is revealed-concealed the

translucent face of a second man at the heart of

the refugee camp’s mosaic of brown-pink-gold

stains fading in the last glow of the day.






kilometer



Characters

Anonymous

Image

And at another moment, without any preparation, the space opens up again, alive and

remembering. The flat, opaque picture collapses inward, uncovering the expanse that was

hinted there at the outset, before the absent-mindedness, the fatigue, the dread. The white light

sharpens the outlines of things and highlights them, full. A couple of black figures walk forever

one step, dissolve, one step, dissolve, small and emphasized inside a deep white cube, padded

with light, filtered through the intermittent lines of electric wires and metal poles.

Between a Memory and the End

A Memory

And years later, grief already heaped up dry and frail, peeled membrane over membrane; and

the garden stretching under the white sky, on both sides of the house in Tshernichovsky Street,

erupting thorny bushes and wild grass under the array of metal poles rocking in scarred cement

pits. Wind-whipped age-white feathers are trapped between wilted stems, hollow seed bells,

mute, and in the back corner, the bodies of the oil-sweaty sand bags are still lying next to the

ladder leading to the shelter.

Shelter

The furthermost table on the ground level of the

coffee house in Beit Jala, that spreads out over

three green terraces from which one can view the

entire valley, over and past the bypass road, and

the round hills embracing the highway from both

its sides, is set for two.

In several minutes the preparations will be

completed, and the camera will be left there alone,

a blind witness to a stuttering hand gesture; to a

solemn cliché stated in old Hebrew that will attempt

to erect a provisional word shield over the longing

and the admitting-in-advance of pending loss. And

a long time later, when the motion back and for th

of trays laden with plates of salads and meat and

with juice and beer bottles that will remain there

almost untouched, will subside somewhat, under

the brittle shell of a familiar conversation,

something will fasten to something, something will

be bared, raw. And in a moment, the image of M.

and L., seen through the camera struggling,

without the aid of a human eye, to hold on to the

s i g h t s w h i c h t h e s u n h a s a l r e a d y a l m o s t a b a n d o n e d,

will crumble red and disappear.

Shooting Site

Everest Café/Restaurant in Bet Jala, a small

city in the Bethlehem Governorate of the

West Bank, about 10 km south of Jerusalem

Following the Oslo accords (1993) Beit Jala

became part of the Palestinian Authority’s

semi-sovereign territory.

During the second Intifada (2000 Uprising)

Beit Jala was used by Tanzim militants, a

division of the Palestinian Fatah movement,

as a base for firing at the Jewish settlement

of Gilo built directly across from it.

Shooting Occasion

1998. Final production days of a video piece

by L. and R.

Characters


is aiding the two women in the making of

their piece


Raw

From one of the roofs in Jerusalem’s city center it

was possible to see the crowd gathering under

mounds of blue and white sign boards which

responded like an echo to the slogans screamed

out of a portable loud-speaker. The voice of the

crier jutted through the human waves now

cramming the square and already swept sideways

to the adjacent streets. And there was someone

there who had lit a swaying torch, the flame fuming

over the many-headed monster, held high into the

heart of the plaza, the heart of the crowd, to the

place in which was suspended the hated rag

dummy, a cloth-head stuck on a long pole; the

torch flung high and forward fervently, surges of

rage swarming-tightening around it, urging then—

and they will urge again (a torrent of bullets, a

burst of red fire)—to stomp, smash, tear down the

mother fucker, to burn his face of f.

Recalled Location

Jerusalem, Kikar Tzion (Tzion Square)

Recalled Time

A right wing protest which was blamed by

the Israeli Left for inciting Prime Minister

Rabin’s murder in 1995. Rabin was murdered

at the end of a rally in support of the

Oslo agreements.

The Oslo Accords were the first direct

agreement between Israel and Palestine, and a

basis for the future relations between Israel

and the anticipated State of Palestine.

The Oslo Accords have themselves been

strongly criticized for restricting the economic

growth of Palestine and its existence as an

unfragmented national entity and social space.

Characters

Anonymous

Mound

The structure upon which the kid is leaning has

already been deser ted for almost a year. Yet it

seems, for some reason, that something in there is

moving, tumbling down. He will turn back for a

moment, his hands still resting on a narrow shelf

cutting horizontally across the bottom plane of the

cement house, and then will resume staring at the

group gathered about twenty meters in front of

him, deaf, like the mute image, to the conversation

taking place there first in Arabic, then in Hebrew,

and in which again so little of the pretext for

destruction is clarified. Wedged minuscule and

precise, like a nail, amidst the almost imperceptible

motion of the walls collapsing behind him, the

earth dropping under his feet, he is fixed at the

center of a picture of an abandoned building,

ripped open, stooped on a piece of land cracked

from thirst.


Demolished house at the outskirts of Al-Khalil



out three types of house demolitions: “Clearing

operations,” which are intended to meet

what Israel defines as “military needs;”

Administrative demolitions of houses built

without a permit; and house demolitions

intended to punish the relatives and neighbors

of Palestinians who carried out or are

suspected of involvement in attacks against

Israeli civilians or soldiers 1 .







Participants

Anonymous




Demolished home owner’s son



1. Through No Fault of Their Own,Nov. 15, 2004,

B’Tselem Publications

Abandoned

The broken wooden shutter in the building across

is still knocking on the window pane, pounding on

the cement wall and back against the glass. No

one is inside. The blue light falling on a wall-patch

exposes long crooked crevices in the grey plaster

and a blush of mould. The adjacent balcony is

deser ted as well. On a loose nylon cord crossing it

from corner to corner hangs a sun-faded rag, the

torn edges of which quiver like a broken winged

bird in the cold breeze. The entrance to the house

has been locked several months now and the

curtain is drawn shut over the glass door. Only the

shadows of the branches of the thin tree poking

out through tattered dusty sheets, beer cans and

shreds of newspapers scattered-tossed on the

ground of the interior cour t yard, slide moonstruck

over the wall and into the dark hollows in the

cement sur face.





buildings housing foreign workers side by

side with older local residents and a growing

young artists’ community




Participants


which the scene is taking place L. is residing

in a three room apartment across from the

depicted building.

Inside

The books were already packed in cardboard

boxes that were piling one on top of another in the

front room. In the nex t room L. was wandering

among residues of living and of life which needed

to be folded, filed, scrubbed; laboring to silence

within them the marks of body and of time, to let

go of the place that inhabited her, with all its

details and habits, one heart-finger after another,

with effort, as of a tight-fastened palm of a

sleeping baby.

Recalled Location



Recalled time

1999. The video project has been completed,

and L.’s departure to the U.S. is pending.

Characters

L. - An Israeli videographer residing in a three

room apartment in Florentine

Departure

In the far boundar y of a small one-way alley stands

a cement wall stained by of f-white brush strokes

with which a slogan in Arabic was perhaps

burned-in many winters ago. In front of the wall,

supported by a broken grey rock that remained

there raw under the cement surface, like the

unfinished foot in Michelangelo’s sculpture, a black

rust-eaten barrel is set, its body, molded of three

wide metal rings, slightly leaning towards the left.

The area of the entire picture consists of the space

opened up amid the two buildings delineating the

entry to the alley, a pink-red wall on the one side

and a wall painted in alternating sunset colors, on

the other. Between them, over a por tion of a path

dotted with small pebbles, a sof t puddle of peach

light mingled with deep and grey shade is drawn

from a hidden somewhere, spreading wav y towards

the front of the photograph.

bike between his legs, his finger hovering slightly

over the top ring of the barrel in something of

a farewell/support/momentum gaining gesture

before he will rise into the bike seat, a touch of

light passing over the back of his neck, and will

disappear into a secret fold at the edge of the

far wall.

Meanwhile, following the simple operation of an

image processing sof tware, the two color sur faces

that frame the alley expand, red on the right,

brown-orange on the lef t, narrowing the crack into

the dead end path, till nothing remains visible but

the thin finger still reaching into the dark opening

of the barrel, feeling-not-feeling its rim.






kilometer



Characters

Anonymous

Near the back wall, a child in bright colored t-shirt

rests on the rock. On the dusty path at his feet a

silver bicycle lies upside-down, its wheels spinning

feebly in the autumn wind: a turn and then another

turn and another. Close to him, behind the dirty

orange front wall, can be glimpsed another kid in

loose green-blue tank-top and shor ts, an identical

Dead End

The camp, in the distance, is surrounded by tanks. From here, the smell of the twin towers’

smoke still rests in the air, twirling the flag that was waved coarse by the pain of a maimed city,

and the camp, grey-pink, is surrounded by blind tanks, surrounded by a hate that consumes

itself in the refugees of a mute refugee camp. And even if we all stood in front of the iron beasts

crawling in, crawling over the mortification of the sewage puddles and the cigarette butts,

between the cracked walls and the peeling rust and paint, trampling over the broken asphalt

and over the heart, crushing the dream of those refugees and of the ones they are carrying

inside them, even then the tanks won’t stop.

Distance 1

At the end of the world, being at a distance, being reserved, beyond the horizon, beyond the

sea, breaking distance, consuming miles, decimeter, difference, distance measurement, far

away lands, far from the eye far from the heart, far, far off, furthest distance, finger, foot, a

godforsaken place, horizon, keeping distance, kilometer, length, length measurement, light year,

making distance, meter, mile, millimeter, perspective, remote control, remote, space, stopping

distance, telephone, the distance between the sun and earth, a thousand years of light

distance, walking distance.

1. Word for Word: The Thesaurus of the Hebrew Language, Eitan Avneyon. Israel: Eitav, 2000

End

Night. In an abandoned parking lot near the path

for pedestrians paved along the Hudson all the

way down to its south end, a figure is drifting,

sliding, forgetting herself on the black wheels,

backwards and forwards, her feet dancingdeciphering

a private rhythm throbbing inside her.

Gliding along the empty grounds aimlessly, she

inhales the hot scent of thick sweat mixed with

cigarette smoke and car fumes, and is sailingcarried

into the rain of city lights sprayed upon

her. The dance engulfs her, lifts her, spins her

body light as air within a gaze without margins and

seeing backwards. The world funnels future-less

sorrow-less into that moment and into the one

immediately replacing it.


New York. A promenade in the west

of Manhattan

Video Recording Time

Spring 2000

Participants

Anonymous

Soon, another figure, precisely identical, joins her,

passing along a similar path, backwards and

for wards, the turns repeat and recur doubling as

in a mirror the ones preceding them. And thus the

two dance there attuned to the same hidden

rhy thm, their bodies semitransparent, one nex t to

the other, or one in place of the other, duplicating

the absence that the repetition is attempting to

conceal, in retrospect, and the isolation, at the

hear t of that moment which itself is only an echo

of a moment that preceded it and that there is no

longer a way to recover.

Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains

Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains, a multi-channel video

installation produced by Tirtza Even, is referencing video

material recorded for Kayam Al Hurbano (Existing on its

Ruins, 1999), a piece produced in collaboration with Bosmat

Alon with sound design by Brian Karl and with the participation

and aid of Mohammed Laham and Abdel Hadi Hantash;

as well as material from Flicker (2000), a collaboration with

Brian Karl, and Windows (1999), a piece originally produced

with the help of Gerard Lynn.

Original text (Maree Makom): Tirtza Even

Translation from Hebrew: Tirtza Even and Brian Karl

Video camera, video editing and 3-D animation: Tirtza Even

Apartheid Wall photography: Toby Millman

Music: Oded Zehavi

Voice over: Tirtza Even

Book design: Elisabeth Paymal, paymaldesign.com

The project was made with the funds and generous support

from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor:

The Institute for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship

OVPR Faculty Award

Rackham Faculty Grant

The School of Art & Design

The material for Kayam Al Hurbano was produced with

the support of Ami Steinitz Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv,

1998–1999.

Video and CD-ROM Distribution: Heure Exquise!,

BP 113, F 59370 Mons-en-Baroeul, France

I would like to extend my very warms thanks for their

endlessly generous and detailed help in the making of

the various stages of this work to Jim Cogswell, Larry

Cressman, Charles Fairbanks, Daniel Herwitz, John Landau,

Eric Maslowski, Toby Millman, Elisabeth Paymal, Dan Price,

Mark Scott, Anton Shammas, Hannah Smotrich, Elona

Van-Gent, Sadie Wilcox, Oded Zehavi, the staff and my

fellow fellows at the Institute for the Humanities,

University of Michigan.

© 2008, Tirtza Even

Maree Makom

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