The Aliens

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The Aliens 2012 41 images / different sizes

description

 

Transcript of The Aliens

Page 1: The Aliens

The Aliens

2012 41 images / different sizes

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based on a collection of photographs taken in different locations and long period of time, a fictional sci-fi narrative about a group of astronauts returning to a landscape they think they left, wondering if such return is possible, or if all returns are fictional acts...

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The whole act of making a landscape of Palestine, or what can be called ‘The Open’ –that which is ‘outside’ the urban space-, of making it a timeless continuation of the imagined biblical landscape, has been part of the Zionist process for colonizing the land and replace its native inhabitants. This process knows two phases: First by making the native inhabitants part of the scenery, part of the landscape, in order to lend the image authentic aesthetics. Secondly, by inverting that very process, and looking at them as underdeveloped characters who fail to understand the value of this landscape, and therefore the land should be taken away from them and turn the desert into a blooming country of ‘milk and honey’. They are there to produce the scenery and then disappear.

This reduction of Palestine into the ‘status of a landscape, alienates Palestinians from the land, but interestingly, not from the image representing the landscape. Our accessibility to the land is limited and restricted by different encounters: temporary and structural, procedural and bureaucratic. The Wall, checkpoints, bypass and settler-only roads, settlements, military zones, and of course all the necessary permissions

which have become harder than ever to obtain, distance us from being familiar with the landscape. It castrates the possibility to construct a collective relation in and through the land and its geography. It exiles the land without expelling the indigenous; we become passersby on the road-networks penetrating the landscape when travelling from one ghetto to the other -the Ghetto nowadays known as Area A- we become temporal inhabitants of the roads looking at that timeless landscape.

Strangely, we “Palestinians” can’t see that very biblical landscape; we don’t belong to it because we are it. Our vital space is its continuation through the history, and when we begin depicting that space as a landscape we begin falling in that alienation from what used to be a space.

From the Nakba throughout the years of occupation, this landscape has been represented as an image of vanishing space, from a possible site to a distant sight that represents all these policies and structures of separation and oppression. These images are produced to represent feelings of loss and trauma of the conflict; images of olive groves, of ancient

roots of villages, of the terraces, etc. Images that document the actions of the occupation, showing the gray concrete wall penetrating the land, settlements in the horizon, the misery of the queues of people waiting at checkpoints; whether mass mediated and in art, by foreign and local photographers. All these images are familiar to us, this is how we see the land; a landscape practiced through occupation and alienation. We become fixated on the visual representation of our political status, we become familiar to this landscape because we become used to seeing it as an alien place.

Clearly I am not implying that we “Palestinians” never had a landscape before the British Mandate or Israeli occupation, far from that, every nation has a landscape that it relates to, and constructs part of its collective narrative through its traversals and imaginations. The problem is not in the landscape as a scene, but in the act of transforming the space to become a scene; violence isn’t only what is practiced through space, but also in making a landscape out of that violence, i.e. The Wall is not there only to separate us from the land, it is also to become our landscape.

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from the show at EOA.Projects. London, 2014

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