Maree Makom
You are viewing the pdf version of Maree Makom, the text underlying Once A Wall, or RippleRemains, a video installation by Tirtza Even. Where the pages are oversized in the pdfrendering, 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.
- Page 5 and 6: Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains:Mare
- Page 8 and 9: Between Then and Now1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8
- Page 10 and 11: PastThe road leading down from the
- Page 12: FlagOn one of the rear apar tment b
- Page 15 and 16: SeaNot far from there, one cloudy e
- Page 17 and 18: SilenceDaylight was almost gone whe
- Page 19 and 20: ArchiveH. is standing behind the vi
- Page 22 and 23: BuildingSuddenly a balloon appears
- Page 24 and 25: LockA complex code embedded in an e
- Page 26 and 27: RecordThrough a square orange windo
- Page 29 and 30: ConversationWhen the two shots will
- Page 31 and 32: NowAnd then, one moment, the pictur
- Page 33 and 34: LanguageThe short paragraphs were a
- Page 35 and 36: PictureIn the nex t day’s newspap
- Page 37 and 38: Eye to EyeAnd at the left corner of
- Page 39 and 40: Voices12:10 They say we steal water
- Page 41: MeetingUnder that same white summer
- Page 44 and 45: StoneUpon a barrel of cement standi
- Page 46 and 47: Between a Memory and the End
- Page 48 and 49: ShelterThe furthermost table on the
- Page 50 and 51: MoundThe structure upon which the k
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.
Video Recording Site
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
Video Recording Occasion
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.
Video Recording Site
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
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 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
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem
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
by L. and R. where dream-texts written by
R. are used as scripts for scenes shot in
Palestine/Israel.
Characters
M. - A Palestinian man living in Deheishe who
is aiding the two women in the making of
their piece
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
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.
Video Recording Site
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.
Video Recording Occasion
1998. Initial production days of a video piece
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
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem
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
the south of Tel Aviv
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
M. - A Palestinian man living in Deheishe who
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
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
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.
Video Recording Site
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
Video Recording Occasion
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
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem
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.
Video Recording Site
Apartment building in a large city, perhaps
New York, perhaps Tel Aviv
Video Recording Occasion
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.
Video Recording Site
Al-Khalil surroundings. A Bedouin tribe
settlement
Video Recording Occasion
1998. Production of a 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
Four Bedouin men from the visited tribe
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem
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.
Video Recording Site
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
Video Recording Occasion
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.
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.
Video Recording Site
Z.’s rooftop apartment in the old city
of Jerusalem
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 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.
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem
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.
Video Recording Site
Apartment building in a large city, perhaps
New York, perhaps Tel Aviv
Video Recording Occasion
1998. An assembly of window scenes shot at
nighttime in a variety of urban settings
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.
Video Recording Site
Al-Khalil surroundings. A Bedouin tribe
settlement
Video Recording Occasion
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.
Video Recording Site
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
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 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.
Video Recording Site
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 .
Video Recording Occasion
1998. Production of a video piece by L. and R.
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).
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem
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.
Video Recording Site
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. Production of a video piece by L.
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.
Video Recording Site
Demolished house at the outskirts of Al-Khalil
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 .
Video Recording Occasion
1998. Production of a video piece by L. and R.
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
H. - A resident of Al-Khalil and an Al-Khalil
municipality engineer, who is aiding the two
women in the making of their piece
Demolished home owner and his son
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem
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.
Video Recording Site
Al-Khalil surroundings. A Bedouin tribe
settlement
Video Recording Occasion
1998. Production of a video piece by L.
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.
Video Recording Site
Apartment building in a large city, perhaps
New York, perhaps Tel Aviv
Video Recording Occasion
1998. An assembly of window scenes shot at
nighttime in a variety of urban settings
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.
Video Recording Site
Apartment building in a large city, perhaps
New York, perhaps Tel Aviv
Video Recording Occasion
1998. An assembly of window scenes shot at
nighttime in a variety of urban settings
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.
Video Recording Site
First scene: Al-Khalil surroundings. A
demolished home of a Palestinian family
Second scene: Deheishe refugee camp
Video Recording Occasion
1998. Production of a video piece by L.
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).
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem
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:
Video Recording Site
Al-Khalil surroundings. A Bedouin tent
Video Recording Occasion
1998. Production of a video piece by L. and R.
A Bedouin woman reporting an attack by a
settler (U.) residing on a hill overlooking her
tent
Participants
Bedouin woman
U. - Settler
H. - A resident of Al-Khalil and an Al-Khalil
municipality engineer, who is aiding the two
women in the making of their piece
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem
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.
Video Recording Site
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. Production of a video piece by L. and R.
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
M. - A Palestinian man living in Deheishe who
is aiding the two women in the making of
their piece
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
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.
Video Recording Site
Demolished house at the outskirts of Al-Khalil
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 .
Video Recording Occasion
1998. Production of a video piece by L. and R.
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
Anonymous
H. - A resident of Al-Khalil and an Al-Khalil
municipality engineer, who is aiding the two
women in the making of their piece
Demolished home owner’s son
L. - An Israeli videographer residing in Tel Aviv
R. - An Israeli writer living in Jerusalem
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.
Video Recording Site
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
Video Recording Occasion
1998. Unstructured assembly of scenes from
the neighborhood’s life
Participants
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.
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
Florentine, a working class neighborhood in
the south of Tel Aviv
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.
Video Recording Site
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. Production of a video piece by L. and R.
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.
Video Recording Site
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