Yonat Nitzan-Green, You Are Here, Installation, 2013

Graphite powder, plastic glue, emulsion, floor padding foam

Including a performative painting with choreographer and dancer Gabriel Galvez http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhKuJDZkbUY&feature=youtu.be

Once upon a time, in the summer of 1986, a terrible collision occurred between a minibus and a truck; ten young lives had ended abruptly. Teenagers came back from a summer camp. My fifteen years old brother was among them.

The road fascinated me from a young age. Where I grew up, in kibbutz Heftzi-bah, there were no roads, only paths. The kibbutz owned a few vehicles and if you wanted to go somewhere you would borrow a car. Most of the time we just lived in one place. My mother’s family lived on another kibbutz. When she got married she moved to my father’s kibbutz. On holidays, my grandmother used to come and take me with her back to her kibbutz – Ashdot Yaakov. Since she didn’t drive we traveled by bus or hitched-hike. For me it was always an exciting adventure.

I remember other times when we went down to the kibbutz’s gate and set on a bench, just looking at the cars passing by. There was a curiosity to see if any of these cars will turn in and come to the kibbutz.

Today most kibbutzim are going through a process of privatization, people own cars and roads are being built in the kibbutz, as it grows.

My interest in roads has re-emerged following the loss of my brother’s life.

I see road as a place of life and death. In a political context, roads are being built in the middle of Palestinian neighborhoods as part of the Israeli occupation; they increase fragmentation of these communities.

I have been looking closely at a Palestinian town which got destroyed in 1948. This town is called Samakh; it was 10 minute drive from kibbutz Ashdot Yaakov, yet I first heard about it only in 2008, through reading not history but fiction. Today instead of Samakh there is a car park and a large junction. For more details about Samakh follow the link: http://www.palestineremembered.com/Tiberias/Samakh/index.html  

To read more please look at my blog (Road 2013): http://yngroad.blogspot.co.uk/

You Are Here (written both in Arabic and Hebrew on the wall) opens a space to mourn both the personal and the public sorrows at the loss of life.  I construct my work on my maternal subjectivity, in particular, the bringing together of the persona and the political. 

A Way to Remember was a performative painting with a ritual orientation which was done over a period of 5 days. This kind of work make visible not only the end result, but the process. The body itself – the painter’s body – is made visible together with the painting. The inclusion of my body in the work is significant for it is that same body who visited the place where Samakh was. Even if the town doesn’t exist anymore, the place still exists. Standing there, next to these empty buildings, on the burning asphalt in August, I remembered it through my body, with my senses, the way one listens to the unknown. Perhaps echo of life which ended abruptly still vibrates in this place. In the painting the ‘houses’ as shapes begun to resonate with other similar shapes which are not houses, such as graves or bomb shelters. On reflection, I realized that these structures came from my personal and collective memory. As a young girl I have experienced both the Six Days war (June 1967) and the Yom Kipur war (October 1973). 

In a visit to Israel in 2009 I went to Tzemach, where Samakh used to be. I wanted to see if I can find some traces. Tzemach is a big junction where there are petrol station, local college, some shops and a memorial monument for Jewish Israeli soldiers who got killed in the wars. At the far end of a car park I finally saw 3 buildings which are what left from the railway station. They were surrounded by a barrier net together with small signs which read: ‘Historical building for conservation’.  

A photograph of Samakh entitled: ‘Ahmada Turaani Shop In the Centre of Samakh Before Occupation (1948), Palestine’

Posted by Nayef Mustafa in Palestine Remembered web site.

http://www.palestineremembered.com/Tiberias/Samakh/index.html