About hope in concrete

About hope in concrete

21/06/2020
Video
In reaction to the ever-increasing Israeli colonisation and in the very specific context of Israel's planned annexation on 1 July 2020, I made a video entitled "About hope in concrete": a trio sonata for concrete mixers interpreting the Israeli national anthem. 
 
The music, divided into three bands of frequencies converted into electrical signals, intermittently powers the engine of the concrete mixer painted in the colours of the Israeli flag in order to give this song its true dimension, far from a lyricism that is out of place. The original hymn is present only through the rhythmic display of the song's lyrics.
 
The hope (hatikva) of the Jewish "people" to live in "their" land, which is the subject of this song, is brought into direct confrontation with one of the tools of its implementation, namely the concrete of colonisation. This re-contextualisation operates a shift from the pure propagandist and segregationist register of this anthem - from which the Palestinians are obviously absent - to the mechanical and calculated coldness of a long work of ethnic cleansing through the colonisation of Palestinian lands and the segregation that prevails there.

As for the form of this work, the apparent video documentation of an installation is not itself merely a documentation. It is a video work in its own right, reflecting, through its conception and its deceptive relationship to reality, the fictitious narrative construction on which the State of Israel was built and continues to be built (see in this regard How the State of Israel was invented? by Shlomo Sand). 
This video is the result of the assembly of three distinct shots of the same cement mixer filmed in three different positions, making up the fictional documentation of an installation that only partially existed. The documented reality is a fictional concoction, so that the presupposed observation reported by the camera apparatus, the reality to which this video bears witness, is more the manifestation of a fable than of an honest relationship to reality, just as Zionist propaganda tells a story that suits itself, composes a narrative that voluntarily detaches itself from this same honest relationship to reality and tries to rewrite its story in order to redefine history and thus influence the future. 
It is this unethical relationship to the world of Zionist propaganda that manifests itself in the very conception of this video.