Tirtza Even, Fellow of the Month

Read more about Tirtza Even's career and work by visiting her web site,

ONCE A WALL, OR RIPPLE REMAINS

(To watch her powerpoint lecture about this project, click here.)

In1998-99 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 Beth-Lehem, 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 occupation and usurpation even in this “secondary theft” of representation and of images, the recording this encounter became particularly charged. Our goal was to embed the complexity of our viewpoints in the visual and audio characteristics of the people and places. A reflection of our position--as reaching out and invasive; as empathetic and ignorant, shut out or closed off--the image of the Palestine/Israel conflict was hence determined by a politics of the singular, the shifting and detailed.

Our narrative language and framing of images were meant to solicit this complex of perspectives and allow the viewer to ruminate upon it.

Two years after the completion of Kayam Al Hurbano 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 an interplay between the two iterations of the place (Palestine/Israel). 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 was the project I worked on and completed while a Helmut Stern Professor at the Institute for the Humanities in 2007-8. It is the last fold in this larger on-going project, and 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 would incorporate these images in a “passage through” media, which takes on new values in the light of the ongoing history of violence in Israel/Palestine. I refer for example to the ensuing uprising (Intifada) that has been responded to with further acts of forceful containment such as the wall now being built to physically divide the two nations, or Israel’s recent military assault in Gaza and Lebanon.

The piece can be presented in one of two alternative ways:

1. As a single channel video, 66 minutes in length, consisting of the various scenes strung in sequence.

2. As a set of eight to ten shorter sequences drawn from the 36 scenes and presented simultaneously on individual screens in a gallery space.

In addition to the two video versions of the work, a printed version of the piece, designed by Elisabeth Paymal, has been produced which incorporates the entire text of Maree Makom alongside still images extracted from the video material.

My intention in all these renderings of the work is to treat the text of Maree Makom as a series of staging instructions, and with the aid of a 3-D animation software to mould 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 two-dimensional plane. The fabricated landscape, that is, is exposed as such: as alive, imagined and assumed as well as partitioned, distorted, multiple and broken.

In all this I aim to work at the intersection of abstract space (geometrical and digitally created) and historical intensity. In such a space the viewer can be offered some distance from the starkness of history to meditate upon it. That is, to think about memory, silence, and the ordinary life of people which, interrupted, becomes all the more haunting.