Yossi Atia and Itamar Rose fabricate pre-enactments in their respective works with the public - they explore formal models of events which have been absorbed into public memory through past events, and use them to speculate about participants’ personal futures. In their works “Memorial Day” and “Missiles in Ramat-Gan” they offer a similar act.
For “Memorial Day” Yossi and Itamar asked people in the street to film their own future-televised eulogies to be broadcast in case they be hit by a suicide bomb attack. The work deals with bereavement as it is experienced on the national level, through the state owned TV channel that broadcasts a 24 hour long series of captions, listing the names of the fallen during Memorial Day. The idea that memory is shaped by the media is in the foundation of the work but pre-enacting it allows for the interference of the victim in the process of the production of myth and memory.
In “Missiles in Ramat-Gan”, which was shot in the summer of 2006 during the Second Lebanon War, Yossi and Itamar presented themselves as reporters from a TV channel with little financial means. On the premise that missiles will no doubt fall in Ramat Gan one day, they interviewed the public as if they had just fallen, capturing mock-reactions versed in the language of war unique to the Israeli psyche. In order to create footage for the TV station to be used in the case of missiles actually falling on the city, people had to re-enact images they had seen hundreds of times before in Israeli media – images of citizens a few minutes after a violent act has occurred, images of fear, casualties, survivors calling their families etc. They re-enact the terror attack according to the way it has been shaped by the media and pre-enact their own deaths in a familiar way so that it can fit into the customary framework of media coverage.
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