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.

A collaboration of five women artists from different art disciplines propose, within the framework The Jerusalem Biennale, a critical look at the concept of “four cubits.” With visual artist, Bitya Rosenak, poet Avigael Ilan Antman,  interdisciplinary artist Ariane Littman, performance artist Sigal Weissbein Rozman and singer Yael Tai.

Curator: Gabi Yair

For “The Muse” I chose the site of Metzuke Dragot, a mountainous plateau along the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. Geographically, it has a striking ‘wounded’ morphology as it looms over the spectacular cliffs of Wadi Murabbart. Historically it was there that the Jewish fighters from Judea, led by Simon Bar Kochba, took refuge in hidden caves circa 132-136 CE during the last Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire. On a personal level, it was in Ein Guedi, a few kilometers away that my daughter was wounded during a Scouts’ field trip in 2009.

Following this accident, she suffered 3^rd degree burns and her wounds had to be dressed with sterile gauze and special bandages for over a year. Dressing her wounds at home became part of a painful daily routine whilst in the studio I dressed and sewed cartographic maps of Jerusalem, metaphorically healing the ongoing violent Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A year later I performed on the Northern shore of the Dead Sea, on the shores of Kalia beach that bears her name, there I was mummified and left to drift away in unison with the dying sea. Over the years, gauzes became the natural material used to re-enact healing acts in wounded places.

In the present work, we return together to this primeval landscape bearing many hidden wounds, as mother and daughter, as healer and muse.

The Muse: Kalia Littman

Photo: Avgar Idan, Drone Photographer: Shabtai Tal, Cinematographer: Ruslan Paul, Make-up: Idit Ayala Alagem, Costume: Lera Lemberg

The tent set up in the living-room offered a protected womb-like space to retreat and travel back in time whilst reading and recording postcards received as a child from my parents during their journeys to distant countries in the late 60’s.

As a result of the Covid-19 worldwide lockdown many basic individual liberties were curbed, radically altering notions of space and time. The postcards, an anachronistic mean of communication in our digitalized world, stands as a metaphor for these peculiar times of physical and social distancing from family members enhanced by geographical distances and closed borders.

During the performance, traveling back in time to exotic countries, I roll up anew entangled gauzes in a vain and Dadaist attempt to soothe the mental wounds of the current pandemic striking the world.

The performance was filmed during 15 min. on Facebook Live by my daughter Kalia in home confinement together with me.

Historical Background:

After the fall of Jerusalem and Judea to the Romans in 70 CE, the fortress of Masada remained the last rebels’ stronghold. Following several months of siege, the rebels committed collective suicide in an ultimate gesture of freedom on the spring of 73 CE. Not one living soul remained to fall into the hands of the Romans, or so believed the last fighter.

But Josephus Flavius writes that: “an old woman escaped, along with another who was related to Eleazar, in intelligence and education superior to most women, and five little children. They had hidden in the conduits that brought drinking-water underground while the rest were intent upon the suicide-pact.” It was these women who conveyed the story to the Romans when they entered the fortress at dawn: “…Seeing no enemy, but dreadful solitude on every side, fire within, and silence, they were at a loss to guess what had happened…the noise came to the ears of the women, who emerged from the conduits and gave the Romans a detailed account of what had happened, the second of them providing a lucid report of Eleazar’s speech and the action that had followed.” Josephus Flavius, Of the Jewish War, Book VII, Chap VIII

Masada – HerStory was inspired by the forgotten rebellion of two women against their leader, Eleazar Ben Yair. In the present movie, five women pay homage, each in her own special way, to these two women and to their alternative choice.

At sunset, Masada wrap herself again in a cloak of mystery.”Here stand mountains round about, congealed and silent. They are eternal witnesses, ever intelligent, seeing everything always, hearing everything always, and knowing how vain the toil of the climbers has always been.”  (Yitzhak Lamdan, Masada: A Historical Epic 1927).

The movie: 11:11′ (extract on site: 1:38′)

Cast:  Hagar Dagan (flutiste), Maya Yogel (dancer), Yaeli Tai (singer), Alexandra Lavastine (mummy), Sigal and Avner Weissbein (mother and son).

Cinematographer: Talia (Tulik) Galon, Editor: Ora Maimon Pilewski, Aerial Photographer: Aviv Kegen, Camera assistant: Lior Mamon, Photographer: Gal Mosenson, Costumes designer: Lera Lemberg, Hebrew Narrator: Sigal Weissbein, Original score and lyrics: Hagar Dagan and Yael Tai, Sound design and music: Marcello Pilewski, Location sound recordist: Ishai Ilan, Makeup:  Idit Ayala Alajem, Post Production: Colorist: Yair Nahson, Visual Effects: Omri Grossman, Studio: Bootke Color Studio, Location: Masada, A UNESCO World Heritage Site, in the Judean Desert.

Map of Masada by Dom Augustin Antoine Calmet, France, 1672-1757, After Jean Doubdan, Siege et Prise de Massada par les Romains, Etching. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem by Elie Posner

After The Watchman
From The Wounded Land Series

This work relates to Alexander Zaïd as the symbol of The Valley (Ha’Emek) and its Zionist Ethos. After the Watchman is part of the Wounded Land Series, a series triggered by the Second Intifada (2000-2005) and the Second Lebanon War (2006). A body of work which deals with the metaphoric healing of visible and less visible wounds inscribed in the geography of the landscape, the city and the body.

In the work After the Watchman, Ram Atkin Matzliach, performer and a student in medicine, uses 200 sterile gauzes to dress the majestic equestrian bronze sculpture of Alexander Zaïd, healing of  wounds, past and present of The Valley of Jezreel, the Biblical site of numerous historical battles.

Incidentally, the performance took place on July 10^th 2018, precisely 80 years after Alexander Zaïd was left bleeding to death on the side of the road.

Alexander Zaïd and the monument in Sheikh Abreikh:

At the beginning of the 20^th century, Jewish farmers established the first villages and Kibbutzim in the Valley of Jezreel, the site of important biblical battles.

A prominent figure of the Second Aliya, Alexander Zaïd, an orphan, emigrated at the age 18 from Vilna to Ottoman mandated Palestine in 1904. He became a prominent pioneer, one of the founders of Kibbutz Giladi and of two Jewish self-defense organizations, Bar Giora and Hashomer. In 1926 he settled with his family in Sheikh Abreik with the mission of overseeing and protecting the land belonging to the Jewish National Fund.

On July 10^th 1938, Zaïd was ambushed and shot dead by Qassem Tabash from the al-Hilaf tribe.

A bronze monument was erected in his memory on the hill of Sheikh Abreik near Beit She’arim, the lost 2^ndcentury AD Jewish city and necropolis, he incidentally rediscovered.

Today, the watchman on his horse overlooks a wounded valley crisscrossed by motorways under construction, as a future planed controversial civil airport might further wound the Valley.

A film by Ariane Littman

Performed and filmed in Sheikh Abreik/ Bet Shearim, Jezreel Valley, Israel

Produced by Studio 11 in collaboration with Beit Hankin Gallery in Kfar Yehoshua

Performer: Ram Atkin Matzliach

Aerial Cinematographer: Aviv Kegen

Cinematographer: Talia (Tulic) Galon

Still Photographer: Gal Mosenson

Editor: Michal Gassner

Original music: Omer Gonen-Haela, bansuri improvisation based on The Song of the Valley, (Natan Alterman, D. Sambursḳi, 1934)

Additional Music & Sound design: Marcello Pilewski

Colorist: Adar Raviv

Post Production Studio: Bootke Studio, Tel Aviv

I would like to thank the Zaïd family, The Israel Nature and Parks authority, The Beit Shearim National Park and the Emek Izrael Regional Council as well as Ayelet Hertswolf, Orna Atkin Raviv and Neta Haber from Beit Hankin Gallery in Kfar Yehoshua for making this project possible.

All rights reserved © Ariane Littman 2018

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.

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