Road collage

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.