The appearance of this no man’s land resembles a kaleidoscope that contains an endless avalanche of objects and landscape elements, creating the effect of an abstract vision: the landscape is strewn with objects pertaining to times of war and calm, and to various forms of neglect, desertion, control, restriction and intrusion. Remainders of abandoned vehicles, construction materials, sheep bones and watering and plumbing pipes are scattered on the ground. Traces pertaining to archeology, botany, politics, strategy, geography, architecture, consumption and sanitation create a scene that is at once threatening and pastoral.
This work focuses on two sites that are located between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Situated on either side of the Qalandia checkpoint and the nearby separation wall – at the symbolic core of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank – these sites appear detached from both their surroundings and from one another. To the west of the wall is the abandoned Atarot\ Qalandia Airport runway; to its east is the quarry at the foot of the refugee camp. The proximity of these two sites, the separation between them, the symbolic inversion, their physical interdependence and functional opposition are the main inspiration for this story.
The process is based on collecting objects and taking photographs in these two sites. The points of view are those of a visiting tourist, an investigator and a spy, who must reckon with fear and desperation. The focus on the city’s periphery derives from a sense of both fear and curiosity, and involves courage, trust, suspicion and sublimation that confront this endless process of collapse. The deserted remainders of this chaotic reality are transformed into fossils cast in insulating and calking materials and dust from the ground. The manner in which the objects are replicated resembles photocopying in terms of its immediacy and degree of precision. The footage resembles news images; both its contents and the manner in which it is filmed have a quality that awakens suspicion, relating as it does to checkpoints, a military robot, aerial photographs, a lynch, censorship, clandestinely shot photographs and espionage. The authenticity of the locations is the result of instability, constant uncertainty and additional limitations. The film includes footage filmed in the original sites and in alternative locations, as well as satellite imagery (from Google Earth) and additional footage shot in a studio.
The story tries to undermine the complex urban order by following an itinerary that contradicts the existing trajectory. The quarry contains constantly shining piles of contemporary fossils – casts of frozen movement from which emerge creatures at different evolutionary stages. As in Ezekiel’s Vision of the Dry Bones, the fossils materialize and coalesce, emerging from the quarry as new creatures. The more developed fossil creatures emerge from the quarry and move on to its negative counterpart – the airport runway.
The fossil’s journey starts optimistically with a new life of wandering, as if at pasture, and continues with further evolutionary development and optimistic inventions, yet this serene existence is disturbed by a form of behavior that reduces the fossils to their original, crude state.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
