Similarly to the Grafted Maps, I relate in this work to a Palestinian map entitled: ‘The Holy Land, Palestine, and Israel,’ produced by the Palestine Mapping Center, edited in 2010 and sold as touristic maps in the Old City of Jerusalem.

This Embryo-Map is part of the “Grafted Land” Series, a series in which segments of conflicted areas are first surgically removed from the body of the map, then dressed and finally stitched with a green thread.

In the present work, like in Twin Embryos (2017-8), the severed segment, bearing an uncanny resemblance to an embryo, depicts the historical area of Judea & Samaria in Mandatory maps, also known as the West Bank since 1948, lacking yet a definite name and political status, this Embryo-map is here connected to a disembodied motherland by umbilical green threads.

In the present work I chose to work with a Palestinian map entitled: ‘The Holy Land, Palestine, and Israel’ sold as touristic maps in the Old City of Jerusalem. Edited in 2010 these maps are produced by the Palestine Mapping Center in Bethlehem. On the original map, Israel and the areas of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights bear different colors.

In the Grafted Maps, the disputed areas are detached from the body of the map then covered in gauze and stitched with a green thread. The graft operation has left red stains and scars. The segment the Judea & Samaria on the Mandatory maps of Palestine, also known as The West Bank following its occupation by Jordan in 1948, bears an uncanny resemblance to an embryo. Frozen in time, it lacks a definite name and political status. In later works the embryo will be totally excised from the map, an orphan lacking a definite mother-land.

Ariane Littman

February 2020

Having previously created artworks with natural elements such as honey, earth, water, air, beehives and milk powder, I decided to use large amount of olives in 1998 for a project at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art.

This sudden desire to use olives was triggered by a buried memory that reemerged from the depths of my subconscious. A memory linked to the first year of my arrival in Israel as a young student and to that of my first war trauma embodied in the First Lebanon War. In the summer of 1982, a student at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a minimal knowledge of Hebrew, the complexity of the conflict escaped me, but the war was a gruesome reality with soldiers of my age dying.

That summer I volunteered at the Kibbutz Beit Hashita where the rough physical work at the olive factory helped me forget the war. Motivated by this sudden recollection, I decided 17 years later to pay a visit to the olive factory. It had changed a lot, no more manual work under the burning. During my visit, I learned that the factory was exporting olives to the US in black plastic barrels. I decided to create an installation entitled ‘Correspondence’ with barrels filled up with thousands of olive pits lightened by a red dim light.

A year later during my pregnancy in 1999, I turned my gaze towards the enclosed space of the barrel, using this time my camera to grasp the essence of these red olive landscapes in the confined territory delimited by the barrel. And as all distinctions between inner/outer, micro/macro, origin/end, implosion/explosion, linear time/cosmic time, finite/infinite, collapsed, my gaze became a vehicle recording those images occurring in that confined territory delimited by the barrel. ‘Core’ was exhibited in a photo installation at the Noga Art Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2000, where I fragmented the space of the gallery with Plaster walls, inducing the viewer to stroll within the interconnected spaces.

In ‘Hidden Maps,’ tiny pictures of these olive landscapes were cut and inserted within the holes of plastics sheets, creating a link between different kinds of landscapes. This work linked together the olive landscapes and hidden roads of Jerusalem’s cartographic maps.

In the short video entitled ‘The Gaze’ created in 2002, the video shows on a double screen a motionless olive topographic landscapes suddenly coming alive thanks to the red bulb moving inside the barrel. Hovering above these olive landscapes, locked within a round circle, a single eye that becomes the manifestation of a disembodied monocular vision staring at the viewer.

In 2003 I created five ‘camera obscura’ using lids of black plastic olive barrels. At the time I was photographing the beginning of the construction around Jerusalem of the security wall. Viewers peeping through a hole inside the lids could see Palestinians villages behind barbed wires lightened in a dim red light. The lids of the olive barrels from the kibbutz of Beit Hashita, previously used in ‘Correspondence’ to view olive landscapes, now framed the sharp reality of the conflict brought about by the Second Intifada. Five years later, in December 2007, I replaced the pictures with those of a Palestinian family harvesting olive trees not far from the fence in a village called Deir El Gusun situated not far Tulkarm, in the West Bank. The combination of these pictures and the barrel lids from the Israeli Kibbutz was a way to merge within an artwork two separate worlds.

In 2004 and in 2006, I created installation works with blackened olive pits. Both the ‘Behind the Wall’ (2004) and ‘Still Life’ (2006) were undoubtedly the outcome to my photographic assignments as a freelance news photographer witnessing the violence of the second Intifada. In August 2006, a few days before the cease-fire of the Second Lebanon War, I strolled through a burned olive orchard, stopping in front of an olive tree ripped apart by a missile fired from Lebanon.

‘Behind the Wall’ is a personal metaphor for a landscape that had forever lost its innocence, leaving no place for romantic and picturesque feelings. It relates to a Holy Land that has become a Border Land, a land of geographic, military and cultural borders. For that purpose I created an installation behind temporary partition walls, relinquishing the main exhibition space using pits turned black, vestiges of yearly wars over olive harvests. In ‘Still Life’ (2006), the black olive barrels were now sliced up, pouring out black olive pits onto the floor. While ‘Correspondence’ gathered sensuous red olive landscapes within round barrels, now the olives black pits leaked out from black and red wounded bellies.

In July 2011 I carried a performance at the Hizma checkpoint located at the North-Eastern entrance of Jerusalem. There I bandaged a dead olive tree that had been uprooted and replanted to beautify the walled landscape but had not survived his dreary environment. The performance and the video ‘The Olive Tree‘ work I create was part of Sisyphean acts of ‘healing’ a wounded landscape.

The combination of barrel lids from the Kibbutz Beit Hashita together with pictures of Palestinian farmers from Deir El Ghusun harvesting their olives was a way to merge within an artwork two separate worlds.

Convergence is a collaboration with my colleague Hannan Abu Hussein. Invited by the Bereaved Families Forum  for Peace, we were given each a ceramic bowl. Having worked together on several projects we decided to put our bowls together and create one bowl. Inside this ‘vessel’ we poured olive pits. I had used olive pits in previous works and we both related to this material from our own past. The bowls were bounded with cement. Cement being  a material we frequently use in our respective works and in our common collaborative works. Like the cement that binds our work together, Convergence is the symbol of our strong mutual friendship and artistic collaboration.

The combination of these pictures and the barrel lids from the Israeli Kibbutz was a way to merge in an artwork two separate worlds.

In my  Jerusalem Scrolls  (2003-2007) I try to witness and capture the short stories behind the checkpoints and the “Separation Wall resulting from the physical, geographical and political changes that took place at the edge of the city of Jerusalem. The first  Jerusalem Scroll created in September 2003, bares witness to the erection of the concrete Barrier in Adu Dis in East Jerusalem. My incursions into the ‘Border Land’ started in 2002, soon after soon after a suicide bomber blew himself up at the entrance of the popular café ‘Moment’ killing 11 people and wounding many more. As insecurity and violence enhanced a feeling of helplessness, I began to travel to the edge of the city in order to better grasp the conflict. I first went to Adu Dis with a Palestinian  colleague, joining from time to time women from Machsom Watch. These women see themselves as ‘civilians challenging the military on its own ground,’ this radical and subversive movement of Israeli civilian women became ‘observers’ at checkpoints back in 2001, bearing witness in the form of reports after each observation. All voluntaries, they  a source of inspiration in these gloomy days of terror and military retaliation. In 2005 when I became a freelance photojournalist I could more easily go cover demonstrations against the Wall. The construction of the Wall which began in 2002 has definitely reduced terror attacks within the city of Jerusalem yet it has also created tremendous daily difficulties for the Palestinian population, enhancing the mutual alienation between the two people.

In one of my scrolls I have photographed a Women’s Peace March that took place in February 2006. It depicts Israelis and Palestinian women from the Jerusalem Link demonstrating against the Barrier. The women started their march at the A’ ram checkpoint and walked until the Qalandiya’s terminal which at the time was still under construction. The march comprised both Israeli women from Bat Shalom and Palestinian women from the Jerusalem Center for Women. The two organizations share a set of political principles, which serve as the foundation for a cooperative model of co-existence between the two respective peoples. They believe a viable solution of the conflict must be based on recognition of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and an independent state alongside the state of Israel with Jerusalem as the capital of both states.

Another two scroll depict the Riots of February 2007 that took place in East Jerusalem (over the Mugrabi issue of the bridge built next to the Wailing Wall and seen as a danger by the Moslem community). One of the scrolls depicts men  praying outside the Damascus Gate. As the prayer ends a man makes a provocative  speech, he is arrested by the border police, this provokes riots. Stun grenades are thrown, rubber bullets are shot, people flee in all direction, a man is wounded. In the second scroll, Border policeman and Palestinians rioters clashes in the vicinity of the Al-Aqsa Mosque where hundred of angry Muslim worshippers threw stones and scuffled with security forces. Soon the narrow streets are filled with clouds of tears gas and sharp booms of stun grenades, the population remained inside their houses until they felt secure enough to come out to find broken cars and the cobblestones walkways littered with rubble, iron bars and vegetables thrown by the protesters.

The post The Jerusalem Scrolls first appeared on Ariane Littman.]]> https://ariane-littman.com/2002/06/the-holy-land-project-1994-2002/ Tue, 18 Jun 2002 12:36:46 +0000 http://50.87.146.82/~arianere/?p=2130 The Holy Land Project sought to enhance the ambiguity of the term “Holy Land” in relation to ordinary commodity products. Following negotiations with branded public and private firms while using ...

In 1997 I used for the first time a ‘Blue Box’ while I worked on the re-location of the memorial stone of the ‘Forbidden Forest’.

The map and the flag on both sides of the box were covered with red wax and the original hole to hang the box became part of the word Holy Land. I also sealed the slit on the box with red wax to enhance the fact that the box was no longer functional and that it could not be used as a moneybox anymore.The boxes were then wrapped with linen strings.

This was my first ‘erased map’ and a very intuitive work which was triggered by the general deep feeling of distress after Prime Minister Rabin’s assassination.

Later in 2002, for an exhibition at The JCCs Gershman Y Gallery in Philadelphia, I created a new edition of 110 ‘Blue Boxes.’ The word ‘Holy Land’ was added on the back of the boxes, using the original hole as part of the word Holy.

Juxtaposed with the work ‘Holy Land for Sale’ and with the photographical installation of ‘White Land,’ my blue Boxes  were the link between the buying  ‘Holy Land’ by my family in 1967, and the ‘Forbidden Forest,’ the ‘erased’ forest of  ‘White Land.’