2023-11-17 19:33:30
Time.news – Art takes the field to document the conflict in Gaza – that of those who live in a kibbutz on the southern border of Israel – and to send a message of hope and peace despite the heavy human toll, the large-scale destruction, with a thought turned to the hostages still in the hands of Hamas. This is the message that comes from MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, which is hosting the screening “Ninety-five percent paradise, five percent hell” in the video gallery from today until November 19th.
The title takes up the terms with which many of the inhabitants of the kibbutzim near Gaza described the life near the border: a life made of daily evaluations of the opportunities of being established in paradisiacal places and the constant risks. A life on the border, where nothing is automatic, obviously very different from that lived in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem or Rome.
“Fragile amenity, absolute beauty with a hint of horror, a meeting place between the luxuriance of life and its precariousness. Peace and war”, underline the organizers. The installation allows the public to take a virtual visit to the Be’eri Gallery, in the kibbutz of the same name, destroyed by Hamas last 7 October, while proposing a project curated by Ziva Jelin e Sofie Berzon MacKie.
© Sofie Berzon McKie
The Be’eri kibbutz gallery
The universal language of places of culture
“What matters today, in hosting this exhibition, is to remember that art survives horrors, that places of culture speak a universal language of comparison, even of conflict and denunciation, but always of respect for the human person” , he has declared Alessandro Giuli, president of MAXXI. “Fortunately, there are antidotes to war and it is a duty for MAXXI, which is a place of culture, art, dialogue and peace, to be a safe haven in giving meaning and measure to our society,” insisted Giuli. “Where there is danger, what saves also grows: art and culture,” concluded the president of the Roman museum, quoting Friedrich Holderlin.
“October 7 also represented a very heavy psychological blow for all Israelis, both at home and abroad. In a context of death and devastation, at the beginning Art seemed superfluous, an offense, but then we thought it could be a way to communicate things that other means don’t say, a place of reflection, dialogue, breathing space. and hope for all. Art is a vehicle for peace,” explained Maya Katzir, curator of the screening.
In a very busy schedule, the MAXXI management did not hesitate to welcome the video works all created by Israeli artists inside the kibbutz over the years. “With this project we want to show the multiplicity of voices that exist in Israel, the diversity: it’s not all black or white. In this painful moment, after the violent attempt to silence that plurality of voices, here we have found a safe space to allow the burned gallery to continue making art, waiting to find a new place in Israel”, underlined Katzir.
Screening at Maxxi
The screening hosted in the MAXXI video gallery is a 50-minute film, made up of five subtitled videos, made by six Israeli artists and all shot in the kibbutz. The films are selected works from the installation recently hosted in the Be’eri Gallery, which was completely destroyed during the attack at the beginning of October. On that day of “one hundred percent hell”, the terrorists of the Gaza-based organization in fact set fire to the gallery and the then ongoing photographic exhibition, “Shadow of a Passing Bird” by the artist Osnat Ben Dovand today nothing remains but ashes.
The Be’eri Gallery, a lively cultural center for over 30 years, has been erased from the map and its curators, Ziva Jelin and Sofie Berzon MacKie, remained barricaded in the ‘safe room’ for hours calling for help and documenting the catastrophe that it took place outside. The Be’eri kibbutz was one of the places most affected in the attack carried out by Hamas, transforming a paradisiacal site into a wasteland of corpses, devastated houses and destroyed fields.
In addition to the multiplicity of interior voices, in the selected works, the gazes that coexist in the soul of someone who lives in the awareness of being observed from the other side of the border and who, in turn, is forced to look at that same border with a mixture of hope and fear.
© Ziva Jelin
The remains of the Be’eri kibbutz tunnel
Videos of the installation
Orit Ishay’s first film, “Smoke in the Desert” (2023), based on a true story and set during the Yom Kippur War, tells of the birth of a friendship between an Israeli soldier and an Egyptian prisoner of war, who will induce the former to free the latter. Using English as a common language, during their exchanges the two soldiers will gradually become aware of their common humanity in war.
The second film, made by Shimon Pinto, “Maktub” (Scritto/Predestinato, 2016), of an autobiographical nature, is an extract from a larger installation in which childish hands obsessively dig the barren earth as if to free something buried, alternating image of a dark dry tree. The autobiographical story to which the artist refers dates back to his childhood and is the dramatic discovery that the uncle on the kibbutz he goes “to visit” is actually a dead man buried in the ground, who fell in the war.
Tamar Nissim, with “The best place to raise children” (2017), proposes a montage of interviews with nine women who live along the southern border on the topic of the difficulty and challenges of living and raising a child in such complex and often hostile, where war is always at the door.
© Sofie Berzon McKie
An aerial view of the kibbutz before the destruction
In the fourth work, written by Nir Evron and Omer Krieger – entitled “In the rehearsals of the spectacle of visions” (2014) – the inhabitants of Kibbutz Be’eri recite the poem of the same name from the film, composed by the 99-year-old poet Anadad Eldan of the same kibbutz, survivor of the October 7 terrorist attack and uncle of the well-known historian Yuval Harari. The musicality of the verses, extremely alliterative, is intertwined with the images of internal and external spaces of Be’eri, in a fusion of faces in which the individual mixes with the other. An emblematic film of the collectivism and solidarity of the kibbutz, an experience also criticized in Israel.
Finally, in “Saluki” (Lebanese River), created in 2019 by Tzion Abraham Hazan, four inhabitants of Be’eri meet after dinner to recall a tragic friendly fire incident that occurred during the battle of Wadi Saluki, in Lebanon. Their hands reconstruct the story using cutlery, utensils and food scraps, including a turnip that stains everything with its red color.
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