During their time at the Where To? archive, Yochai Avrahami and Doron Tavori sought to reexamine Laurence Oliphant’s idea  of establishing a Jewish colony to the east of the Jordan River. This idea was expounded in the 1870s in his book The Land of Gilead and Excursions to Lebanon. The territory suggested lies between Jericho and Amman, bordering on Jabbok River to the north and the center of the Dead Sea to the south. Oliphant was motivated by a wish to strengthen the Turkish Ottoman Empire by disseminating Western cultural models based on the colonies of Canada. He saw this as the only way to prevent the empire from crumbling, thereby exposing it to Russian takeover. Another motivation was the hardships suffered by Jews following pogroms in Eastern Europe. The Jews contacted by Oliphant viewed Christian anti-Semitism as far more dangerous than Islamic hostility and adopted his idea. Among other things, Oliphant’s choice of Jews relied on the assumption that the Ottomans would refuse to colonize Christians while the Europeans would not look kindly to an Islamic colonization, as well as the hope that Christian philanthropists would view the Jewish colonization of the Holy Land as a means to expedite the Second Coming.

Oliphant toured Palestine extensively and combined his romantic addiction to the scriptures with detailed and practical suggestions. Together with his wife Alice, he settled in the recently established Templar Colony of Haifa. They also built a summer house in the nearby Druze village of Daliat al-Karmel, where Alice taught the village woman. Their personal assistant was Naftali Herz Imber, who wrote the lyrics for Hatikvah, Israel’s anthem. Alice later died of Malaria, and the Druze villagers carried her coffin all the way to the Haifa cemetery, where her tombstone can still be seen today. The village house is now used as Daliat al-Karmel’s Memorial Center and is managed by a former Member of Knesset for the Likud. Alice’s portrait hangs on one of its walls. Laurence remarried and died shortly thereafter and was buried in London. During the last 20 years of his life who wrote copiously for the London Jewish Chronicle in favor of Jewish colonization of Palestine and was nicknamed the Second Cyrus by the Jewish press.

The first stage of the project focused on the introduction to Oliphant’s book. The conclusion of this stage was presented in Where To?’s closing event. This was the first in a series of lectures by actors accompanied by a background video presentation. The first presentation was played by actor Nimrod Bergman. This work was based on an extensive research which included the collection of archive materials and photographs in the Jordan Valley and other sites. The lectures would try to convey Oliphant’s relentless persuasion attempts which combine romantic and delusional messianic visions with practical ideas. Production values are minimal: one actor, few props. Beyond the performance itself, the main production investment is in the video essay which acts as a visual stream of consciousness, part dream, part PowerPoint presentation.

During their two-week residency at the archive, Avrahami and Tavori organized the materials and looked for further textual and visual materials, and also sought cross-references with other ideas related to the same events. They also worked on the presentation’s visual language and the lecturer’s rhetoric.