Map of Jerusalem, gauze bandages, fabric, plaster, ink and thread, 154 x 110 cm, photo Michael Amar

In this specific map of Jerusalem, I was interested in creating a map in which the overlapping layers of gauze bandages would not only cover a map of Jerusalem but would also define two lines of contentions, on the one hand the red line of post-1967 Jerusalem municipal boundaries and on the other hand the 1949 demarcation line better known as The Green Line. These lines were painted in red and green ink similarly to the green ink used while drawing the ceasefire lines on the maps of the 1949 Armistice Agreements following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war between Israel and Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. This Green Line, originally intended as demarcation line rather than a permanent border, has been since 1969 at the core the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The line defining The Old City of Jerusalem is painted in Gold.

The technique:

Over the years, I have developed a technique in my cartographic art using medical sterile gauze dipped in industrial plaster much like a painter using brushes and colors. The gauze bandages first dipped in plaster are then opened into thin membranes, and then still wet, they are put on the original map, layer after layers, days after days, weeks after weeks. These membranes slowly create a new physical cartographic topography  as they erase and partly reveal some of the original map lying beneath the numerous overlapping layers of gauze. The added symbolic value of this specific material, the sterile gauze bandages I buy from a supplier to hospitals, is not only personal but above all lies in its medical history of healing wounds.

This map of Jerusalem used for this work is based on the City Street Map of Jerusalem (1:10000) by freytag & berndt (2019) and the overlapping red and green lines are based amongst other references on maps from the site of Shaul Arieli, an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

During the Second Intifada, maps became both the tool and the trigger to my perambulatory routes around Jerusalem’s changing borders and while they gave me a better understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they also aroused my awareness to their inherent elusiveness and to the tangible geographical, political and cultural spaces they suppress.

The MapLand project relates to an erasure embodied either through military censorship of aerial maps, disappearance of names from historical maps or changing routes on closures maps. This erasure is also present in a more tangible way within the geographic memory of the landscape itself: a dead olive tree near a checkpoint, a hospital for Lepers, ruins of an abandoned village, a forbidden forest, inaccessible neighbourhoods and the ongoing ecological death of the Dead Sea. Most probably all maps since the dawn of human history, before and after script was invented, whilst following some objective codes bear an erasure, a token of overt or covert political interests. Erasure and memory are therefore important themes in my work in general, as they linked to my personal biography, but they are also embodied in the mediums I use, performance, photography and film.

While working with maps or performing in the landscape, I choose to enhance that erasure, either by rendering it more visible or by erasing it obsessively, either by covering with in gauze or by shredding it in a sisyphean obsessiveness bordering on the absurd.

It is through the absurd that I relate to the Dadaist spirit. Discarding mapping conventions, I chose instead to create maps in the same way that Tristan Tzara randomly used cut-out words from a daily newspaper to create his first Dadaist poem in 1917. Cutting closure maps, I reshuffle codes and borders, removing their hegemonic power as I redesign them anew. Dressing them with gauze I further deconstructed cartographic power by sewing around the map the green letter “X” indicating ‘Barrier Gates’ on the original maps. The creative incentive behind this de-construction disrupts the inexorable order of things, offering instead new symbolic borderscapes.

In 2011, leaving my studio and more conventional exhibitions sites, I undertook sewing performances in “wounded“ sites. Wearing a white skirt stitched with closure maps and gauzes, I sewed maps in the 3 religious quarters of The Old City. In 2012, while participating in a cartographic workshop at the Zurich university, I sewed a map at the Cabaret Voltaire, creating a link between the birthplace of Dada and my art praxis. A year latter I sewed till dawn by the spring of the abandoned Palestinian village of Lifta, notorious for its women’s artistic embroidering needle-works.

While the dressing of wounded maps or of wounded landscapes originated in the liminal space of a tentative symbolic and metaphoric healing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this healing became itself embodied in the seamstress, dressed in white. Evoking feminine mythic weavers across continents, she became a character carrying symbolic healing faculties reviving their silent protests and attempts to weave alternative fates.

In the installation at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (DCCA), I presented Grafted Land  together with The Wounded Land Trilogy (2010-2015).

Like all maps which, whilst following certain objective codes, create a subjective reality following overt or covert political agendas, Grafted Land deconstruct cartographic power.

The map, spread on an “operation table” with white and red bandages, spools of green thread and green haemostats, relates to a Palestinian Tourist Map of the Holy Land in which the territories of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Israel are coloured differently. The Green Line (Armistice Line of 1949) and the controversial Separation Wall erected during the Second Intifada figure on the map.

The disputed regions in the Grafted Map, which have undergone a “surgical” procedure, are sliced away from the territory representing Israel on official Israeli maps. The 4 red disembodied and excised parts, of unknown viability, are covered with sterilised gauzes and sutured with a green thread delineating new borders.

Behind the operation table are screened the Wounded Land Trilogy, 3 performances at the Dead Sea, The Hizma checkpoint and in Lifta. All Sisyphean and symbolic acts of healing visible and less visible wounds inscribed in the geography of the landscape and the body.

Sea of Death (2010), The Olive Tree (2012), The Spring (2015)

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 19-20^th century (Compassion, 2014).

More specifically, the video The Spring (2015) is based on a sewing performance held at full moon in July 2013 by the spring of Lifta, a village where its Arab Palestinian women were notorious for their bridal dresses and artistic embroidering needle-works.

The sewing of dressed Wounded Land maps since 2009 came to embody a sick “patient“ in dire need of healing. The dressed maps are made of fragments from ‘Closure Maps of Jerusalem and the West Bank’ and were first ‘operated’ in 2004 in the midst of the Second Intifada as repeated suicide bomb attacks ripped apart the western side of Jerusalem. A protective wall was erected and while dramatically reducing terror attacks, it altered the movement of Palestinians entering the city from Ramallah and the West Bank.

Lifta: historical background

Known in the Bible as Nephtoah, the village of Lifta was a border between the Israelite tribes of Judah and Benjamin. Populated by various people throughout ancient times, the village had been repeatedly invaded by armies on their way to Jerusalem. A prosperous village under the British Mandate, one tenth of the land was owned and inhabited by Jews and the rest by Arabs. Yet, Lifta was not spared in the wake of the Arab-Jewish hostilities of 1947- 48 as the Jewish paramilitary organization of the Haganah fought to secure the western exit of the city during the Siege of Jerusalem. The Arab villagers fled, never to return and Lifta eventually remained deserted.

Since, squeezed between two highways, the uninhabited village of Lifta, like countless vestiges of past civilizations in Jerusalem, stands as a silent wound in the landscape.

The video: “The Spring” 2015

At full moon, in the deserted village of Lifta, to the sound of a magic flute, a woman sews by the pool a dressed map of Jerusalem she has found inside the spring. Evoking mythic weavers and Lifta’s seamstresses, her patient and diligent needlework brings to life the mummified spirit of the place that awakens at dawn, metamorphosing into a young maiden, the future weaver of life.

Written, directed  and produced by Ariane Littman

Cast: The Seamstress: Ariane Littman

The Mummy: Naama Grinstein

Director of photography: Talia (Tulik) Galon

Second camera: Irit Sharvit

Editor: Tamar Gan-Zvi

Picture designer and colorist: Roee Liron

Original Music composed and performed: flutist Hagar Dagan

Sound Design: Marcelo Pilewski

© All rights reserved to Ariane Littman

The new series of maps, entitled ‘Grafted Land’ relates to Palestinian Tourist Maps of the Holy Land. Produced by the Palestine Mapping Center[2], the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights on these maps have a different color then the Israeli areas and are demarcated by the Green Line (Armistice Line 1949) and by the Separation Wall erected at the onset of the Second Intifada.

In the series ‘Grafted Land’, disputed areas undergo a ‘surgical’ procedure to remove them from the map. The West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights on the new ‘operated’ map, have been excised from the territory representing Israel on official Israeli maps.[3] The current map, covered with sterilized gauzes[4] soaked in plaster, shows four severed segments sutured with green thread delineating the borders of those novel entities. The areas on the map of the excised parts are red and so are the used gauzes alongside the wounded map.

 ‘Grafted Land’ is reminiscent of ‘Surgical Operation’, a  performance on closure maps held in 2004 that took place in Jerusalem and of ‘Dressed Land’, a symbolic map installation of a wounded and bleeding ‘Mother Land’ exhibited at Rutgers University in 2012.[5]

 All maps, whilst following certain objective codes, actually create a subjective reality that follows overt or covert political agendas. The series ‘Grafted Land’ leave open the viability of such disembodied entities.

July 2015

The Heara (comments) multidisciplinary art events orchestrated by Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman of the Sala-Manca art group  that took place in Jerusalem during the years 2002-2007, in the midst of the Second Intifada, and involved hundred of artists who exhibited site-specific works in significant sites throughout the city, were the most fascinating art events in which I took part. It was during these events that I did my first performances and that I collaborated with other artists to create works of art. Those events enhanced my perception that Jerusalem was the geographical place I would choose in order to express my art without having to run to Tel Aviv to present my portfolio to curators hesitant to drive beyond the Sha’ar Hagai’s junction. It increased my awareness that art should not dwell into Kantian Disinterestedness, but should instead be rooted into the political and the ethical of a ‘here and now’. It was at a time when, with almost daily suicide bombings and the building of the Wall around Jerusalem, the political conflict entered my art more directly consequently to my work as a free-lance news photographer. ‘Here it is not Switzerland’, with black graffiti in Hebrew written over a huge banderol showing Lindt chocolats snowy Alps’ peaks hanging on the facade of the Sergey Coutyard, created the link between my pastoral country of birth, art and the ‘here and now’ that did not allow me to make blind aesthetic choices detached from the actual context. The banderol was exhibited at the art happening ‘Migrashim Harousim’ (2003) together with two Jerusalem Scrolls showing the Separation Wall in Abu Dis. The event was organised by Lea and Diego in response to Art Focus, the international art biennial, taking place nearby at the Museum of Underground Prisoners.

The Heara events offered the artists the challenge of learning about and ‘reacting’ to the history of a building, bringing together past and present into a work of art, a possibility that could not actualise in the more respectable yet dull ‘White Cube’ museum space. During these events, I also discovered the power we had, we the artists, as a group of creative individuals thirsty to express ourselves without being dependant on the dominant institutions and without having to pursue a ‘courting ballet’ with its curators. In the midst of the Intifada, and afterwards, there was still a reason to create and exhibit in Jerusalem and to be proud of doing so. Lea and Diego created this space and we filled up that space with creative energies and works of art that resonated throughout the corridors and the rooms of those historical buildings. What else could we ask for?

It is  only now in retrospect, after the last Heara 12 at The Hansen House and while reading the documentation in *Heara, that I am able to realise the significance of what happened back then. It was much more then just another colourful art event, it was a real ‘Comment’, an ‘Heara’, about the institutional world of art, about center and periphery and about engaged multidisciplinary creation.

Jerusalem, September 15 2014

For more information on the Heara projects, see: www: no-org.net

Background:

The de-construction and re-construction of  ‘Closure Maps’ of Jerusalem in the ‘Wounded Maps‘ were first created in 2009. In 2011, I sewed one in the Old City of Jerusalem and another one in 2012 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

The Cabaret Voltaire had been the very birthplace of the Dada movement in 1916, a revolutionary art movement that stood against the horrors of WWI. It seemed to me the ideal place to re-enact the ‘healing’ process of this meditative sewing.

Whilst creating the ‘Wounded Map‘ of Jerusalem, I realized that I could discard all mapping conventions, producing instead absurd maps. This, similarly to Tristan Tzara who in 1917 had randomly used cut-out words from a daily newspaper to create his first Dadaist poem.

I incised the maps, reshuffling their codes and borders, removing their hegemonic power while reassembling them anew. In doing so, whilst reinventing new symbolic border-scapes, I felt I could overcome the paralyzing effect of violence experienced as a civilian facing situations over which he/she has no control.

The Video:

DADA-Jerusalem incorporating extracts from ‘DADA’, a film by Greta Deses awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1967, brings together the Dada spirit behind the deconstruction and reconstructions of the ‘Wounded Maps‘ of Jerusalem.

Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to make a Dadaist Poem’ creates the link to the deconstruction and reconstruction of the maps in the studio. The black and white paintings by Dada artist Georges Grosz connect to the paintings by veteran Israeli artist Zvi Tolkovsky.

Recitation of Hugo Ball’s ’O Gadji Beri Bimba’, his first abstract phonetic poem, relates to his ‘Elefantenkarawane, first declaimed at the Cabaret Voltaire in June 1916 and re-enacted in Deses’ movie.

The sewing of the Wounded Maps in Jerusalem and in Zurich weaves the thread of DADA-Jerusalem, a film in homage to the artists whom in reaction to the horrors of WWI created the DADA movement at the Cabaret Voltaire.

Created in times of conflict, DADA-Jerusalem revives the timeless Dadaist spirit as best described by Hans Arp:

“Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.”

Hans Arp in Dadaland, extract from Hans Richter: Dada, Art and Anti-Art, 1964

Credits:

Script, director and producer: Ariane Littman
Editor: Tamar Gan-Zvi
Original Music & Soundtrack Designer: Marcello Pilewski
Cinematography:
Performance in Jerusalem Old City (2011): Yair Tsriker
Performance at the Cabaret Voltaire (2012): Martin Burr
Performance in the studio (2013): David Atzmi
Extracts from ‘DADA’ a film directed by Greta Deses, awarded the Palme d’Or – Best Short Film in Cannes Film Festival (1967)
First abstract phonetic poem by Hugo Ball: O Gadji Beri Bimba (1916): recited by Daphnee Littman-Cohen
Paintings by Artist Zvi Tolkovsky

My thanks to Nicholas and Manfred Deses for allowing me to use extracts from Greta Deses’ movie: Dada (1967) as well as the Cinémathèque Royale of Bruxelles for making it available in a digital format.
A special thanks to Daphnee Littman-Cohen for her recitation of Gadji Beri Bimba and to artist Zvi Tolkovsky for the use of his paintings of Jerusalem.

The post DADA-Jerusalem 2014 first appeared on Ariane Littman.]]> https://ariane-littman.com/2014/09/grave/ Wed, 03 Sep 2014 18:50:10 +0000 https://ariane-littman.com/?p=3769 Bandaged feet, Mount of Olives’ Jewish Cemetery, Jerusalem   In May, Max Jacot asked photographers from the Collective UPJ to take part in a project stretching over several continents. Two ...

Background to the performance

On June 7th 2014 from 5:00 pm till 12:30 am, four women dressed in white performed inside the eastern courtyard of The Hansen Compound main building when entering from the garden’s gate arch usually kept closed. The event took place during the independent art event curated by Sala-Manca, Heara 12- The Historical Comment.

Visitors entering through that gate were welcomed by a women dressed in white and silently led to sit before taking place on a armchair under the arch. There, they were asked by a young woman if they wished to have their feet cleaned. A third woman was busying herself around, bringing fresh water and warming it on a small gaz. The fourth woman played the flute. Following the ceremonial foot-washing  the treatment with therapeutic oils and the dressing, the patient was then led to a bench and offered a  cup of herbal tea.

The performance, Compassion (חמלה), evoked in a subtle and yet universal way, the feeling of compassion vis-à-vis disease, difference and alienation, while creating a sense of care and humility towards anyone entering through the courtyard’s gate. More specifically, the performance tried to symbolically evoke the history of ‘Jesus Hilfe,’ the Lepers House in Jerusalem, where actions of clemency by dedicated nurses from the Moravian Church were carried out daily since 1887. The performance Compassion which lasted for over 7 hours was in itself a symbolic reenactment of their hard work as can be witnessed in the report from 1932 by Mrs Hutton published in the British Journal of Nursing.

Foot-washing ceremony

The foot-washing ceremony relates to an act of humility in the Bible which recount how Abraham welcomed and washed the feet of the visitors, said to be angels, who suddenly appeared by his tent (Genesis 18:1–8). In the New Testament, Jesus according to the Gospel of John (xiii) washed the feet of his disciples during the Last Supper  (Gospel of John 13:1–15). Practiced throughout history intermittently by various churches and by English monarchs between the 13th till the 17th century as a public sign of piety, the ritual fell out of favour until it was restored in 1955 by Pope Pius XII. Practiced usually only on men’s feet, Pope Francis in a notable break from tradition, washed the feet of two women at his celebration of Mass on Maundy Thursday, 2013. This practice of humility has been revived in many churches, for instance in 2006 with washing the feet of the homeless in Richmond or more recently in 2013 in Jordan when Christian women washed the feet of Muslim women  that took refuge from the Syrian civil war in Jordan.

Participants: 

Ariane Littman: director, producer and the woman in charge of the fresh water for the ceremony, Marta Pogost: the hostess, Daphnee Littman-Cohen: the woman proceeding to the ceremonial foot-washing and the dressing, Hagar Dagan: the flutist

Photographs: Udi Katzman