Ground Effect
Single channel video, 13:45 min
An investigation of the constantly shifting, 80 km long line defining the desert's edge in Israel, connecting the mountains of the West Bank in the east with the Gaza seashore in the west. It is where the artist grew up, an area divided between conflicting narratives and layered histories. Everything is in the ground: artificial pine forests planted on demolished villages, dry fields and water reservoirs, military monuments and community graveyards. Many things have been extracted from this land over millennia, and these days it is a part of the desert belt, a global border region defined by ecologically-entangled conflict and instability. The process used to create the work involves walking and scanning the ground via waist-high aerial video, while being surveilled from the sky by a drone. The system behind the layered images in this piece relies on the placement of consecutive moments side by side in the image plane, in a manner reminiscent of aerial mapping techniques as well as geological core sampling.
The video was commissioned in 2016 by the Science Museum in Jerusalem, for the exhibition “Agropolis,” curated by Maayan Sheleff.
Distributed via Video Data Bank
