Wounded Land: A Trilogy (2010-2015), 2015
Over the past two decades I performed and created videos relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While being a freelance news photographer during the years 2004-2008 I worked on the Border Land series. Saturated with the recurrent Israeli-Palestinian cycles of violence witnessed both as an Israeli civilian and as a news photographer and following the Second Lebanon War (2006), I started to work on the Wounded Land series. These works became symbolic acts of dismantling the existential “huis clos“ of the conflict through Sisyphean and absurd acts of healing the visible and less visible wounds inscribed in the geography of the landscape, the city and the body.
In The Trilogy, the landscape itself becomes important, with each location, whether in an urbane or rural environment, chosen specifically for its wound inscribed within its topography. Likewise in 2011, I sewed a dressed Wounded Map of Jerusalem in the three religious quarters of The Old City of Jerusalem and two years later by the spring of Lifta, a village where it is said its Arab Palestinian women were notorious for their bridal dresses and artistic embroidering needle-works. Acts of dressing using sterile bandages took place as well at The Dead Sea, at the Hizma checkpoint and at the historical Hansen Hospital for Lepers in Jerusalem.
The performance of the mummification at the Dead Sea related to the ecological death of the Dead Sea, the symbolic dressing of a dead olive tree at the Hizma checkpoint to the reality of the wall surrounding Jerusalem and the ceremonial foot-washing and dressing at Jesus Hilfe echoed the clemency of the Moravian sisters towards the Lepers of Jerusalem in the 19-20th century (Compassion, 2014).
