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Mapping the Wound: Performances in the Landscape 2010–2022

 During the Second Intifada, as violence became a daily reality, I created maps of Jerusalem in my studio in an effort to process my fear. In March 2002, following the suicide bomb attack at café Moment in the center of Jerusalem, I left the studio, and began walking along the changing borderlines surrounding the city. First as a civilian and later as a press photographer, I documented the erection of checkpoints and barrier walls, creating a new body of works entitled Border Land.

The physical encounters with violent events in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), as well as the traumatic disengagement from the Gaza Strip, which I covered in 2005, had a profound impact on my art. By the time of the Second Lebanon War (2006) and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza (2009), I felt the need to express the wound in a more symbolic way.

In 2008, I exhibited maps from Surgical Operation, a performance I created at the Anglican School of Jerusalem in 2004, in which closure maps of Jerusalem were cut, sewed and dressed in gauze bandages. But it was following my daughter’s accident in 2009 that I started using sterile gauze bandages provided by a medical supplier to dress and sew wounded maps of Jerusalem. The act of dressing echoes the historical role of women as carers in hospitals and on the battlefields while the sewing performances evoke women weaving alternative fates in mythical stories.

Over the years, the short films I create of site-specific, performative acts of healing carried out across the landscape have also served as markers in the process of mapping liminal spaces – the spaces of sometimes invisible and forgotten wounds that remain present in the memory of the landscape, the city, the body and the psyche.

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.