Relli De Vries

 

The location of the sea, and in particular the mingling of the water with

the land, gives birth to life-stories. The life story of a group of people who lives in a place called Jisr Az-Zarka, and whose fluid space life is affected by the presence of water. This effect is not only physical, but also a metaphor of their conditions and presence close to the coast. Like water they have to be somewhere.

I focus on the crucial events in the lives of the inhabitants, and on the political forces that impact their space. I examine the way their life merges with the specific axes of time and space, and at the same time with the existing geological cross-sections.

Water is a condition. It is a geological stratum. As a liquid space it spreads, evaporates and recycles. Seas withdraw when the lands surface, and when land sinks water overcomes it. This fascinating natural self-organization of the solid and the liquid on Earth comes sometimes with disasters. These moments are marked on the network-map of the global rifts. Under the seas and across the lands they bind together the world map. It is indeed an underground border world map. The friction on the border-line is mapped on the deep cross-sections of the geological pages. Then we can begin to observe and understand where rifts burst-open, and how they result in incompatible plateaus, curves, surfacing uplifts and inversions.

Similar to other places along the Mediterranean was once covered by the Tethys Sea. Stand at the feet of Mount Carmel you actually see a riff. The question is what comes after the withdrawal of the water, what is left behind, what is the state of the rock after the water departs.

In some of my projects I express the concept of flooding and withdrawal. The historical events that took place in Palestine, in particular the 1948 war, was an earthquake that shaped the landscape. These events also shape the landscapes I saw throughout my childhood, and which continue to reverberate.

The surface movements and behavior of the components can be read in many directions. This is at the basis of my long-term project ‘The Society of Plants’. As a community that exists on the surface I examine how plants are used and are exploited to mark political and ethnic identities.

One of the plants I focused on is the Akkub (Gundelia tournefortii). It is a rolling plant used for both food and healing. All over the Middle East Arabs identify, use and respect it. I noticed the Akkub because of its special movement: before it dies it disconnects from the root, and it is rolling in the wind to spread its seeds as a mechanism of growth and living. This movement creates a network that tells us on the regime of the winds, of topography, of growth conditions and of blocking.

The changes in the movements of the Akkub are unexpected, reminding us that no movement in nature is fixed and consistent. Therefore, the plant creates a fascinating grid and network that represent movement and obstruction of individuals and groups.

Another aspect that distinguishes the Akkub from other tumbleweeds is the change effected a decade ago in its definition – from a bed weed into a preserved plant.  In the 1950s, the Israeli ministry of agriculture marked it as a bad weed, disturbing the work of Israeli farmers.  During the years the plant became very popular, and Arabs intensified its harvesting so as to provide the restaurants and the markets. The picking of the Akkub requires know-how, in particular the extraction of the fruit from its thorny peel, which the Arabs perform daily and expertly. The picking of the plant was declared forbidden for the fear of the disappearance of plants from the national landscape. Palestinians who were expelled from their lands and live in refugee camps are now employed in Akkub-picking by contractors. Because of their poverty they are forced to violate Israeli law, picking the plant for Jews from the land which was once theirs. This is followed by the arrival of the Green Police controllers who catch them, fine them, accusing them of destroying “our plants” and harming “our environment”. These contrasting events experienced by the Akkub encapsulate the essence of occupation, appropriation and exclusion of the Arabs.

Reading the surface can bring question of the layer that lies below.

Another project I am working on is a cross-section at the heart of Israel-Palestine where Jisr Az-Zarka is located.

 

Looking at a place

wide and deep,

between the mountain and the Mediterranean

between east and west

between the interior and the exterior,

where geological, economic, and political forces form the space.

 

The imaginary coordinate system use the longitude which was fixed arbitrarily, serves to measure world time, and when it crosses with the latitude it identifies locations. In contrast, the east-west latitude, the equatorial, which is the widest area on Earth, is not arbitrary, but originated from real space. In that way space and time exist on maps. In the case of Israel-Palestine space, the longitude is stretched as a skeletal thread along the state. Israel refuses to define its borders, and expands illegally and aggressively to the east but also to the west. In this way the coastal line of the Mediterranean, its “natural” border so to speak, mostly overlaps the country’s western line.

It is a long and narrow country, and so are its geomorphologic structures.

The modernist coastal road, the first autostrade built in Israel to create a fast connection between south and north, is located on the longitude. When the latitude, on which Jisr Az-Zarka is located, meets the longitude, a clash happens. As a result the political and the cultural forces are taken apart, and the causes of the clash are clarified.

Further east this latitude leads me to Jenin. And also to Umm El Fahem, whose borders and identity are now hotly debated – in a state that defines itself a Jewish state, and in which a fifth of its population is Arab.

The east side extends into the land, where there are many Arab states perceived by Israel as hostile. For this reason there is practically no continuous movement inside.

The exterior is the sea and the interior is the blocked land. Similar to other places the Mediterranean coast has become a very lucrative area. At the same time it does not preserve its ecological qualities, and sewage water keeps on reaching the sea. To live by the coast and see the sea is the ultimate dream for those craving for leisure, beauty and luxury.

The inhabitants of Jisr Az-Zarka lived in the Kabbara swamp area for 400 years. They were Bedouin tribes. They knew how to live on water. They earned their living by weaving baskets and breeding buffalos.

The swamp, similar to many other places in the world, served as a refuge for the landless. They came to the place over the years from close by; but also from far away, from the Hawran, Egypt, Trans-Jordan and Turkey. The Kabbara Plain is part of the drainage basin of the Mediterranean.

This plain is rich in water springs and high ground water. The streams coalesce together, and bend westward into the sea. At the heart of the plain is the Roman aqueduct, which was part of the water system of neighboring Caesarea. Part of the aqueduct is a tunnel in the belly of Jisr.

The elongated geomorphologic strips can well be seen also on the surface. This is one of the wettest regions on the coastal plain and many water-sources are present here. It is assumed that also the stratum of the Tethys Sea is locked at the depth of the cross-section.

In 1923 the inhabitants of the swamp experienced an unexpected change. As part of the Zionist project of reclaiming swamps, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA) proposed the inhabitants to evacuate the swamp. In return there were given privately owned lands – the remains of the Roman quarry on the sandstone hill. PICA employed them in the reclamation of the swamp because of their alleged resistance to malaria mosquitoes, and as a replacement of the Jews who got Malaria. Turning from swamp inhabitants into land owners was a dramatic change. They were also employed now as laborers in the fields of the Jewish plantations nearby.

They survived the 1948 war and the fate of so many Arabs – who turned into refugees and remain so up to this day. There are different versions to why this was so. One is that the employers in the neighboring plantations wanted to keep them as workers. During the war many refugees reached Jisr from Caesarea, Tantura, Hadera, Akko, and Arab settlements nearby.

In the early 1970s the modernist coastal road was built partly by confiscating land from Jisr. In that way the road became the wall-border between Jisr and the state.

On the north, parallel to the development of the river reserve, fences were built around the reserve, and the fish pools of the neighboring Kibbutz Maagan Michael. The land between the village and the beech was declared a reserve, partly a national park. That meant that the area belongs to the state, and the inhabitants cannot use it. Their linkage to the sea is blocked to them by law.  In 2003 another 8 meters high fence was built on the south of the village, between the inhabitants and Caesarea – the richest villas area in the country. The argument is that the music which is played in wedding festivities disturbs the inhabitants of Caesarea. The separation-wall is made of layers of huge quantities of red loam, which was spread on the dunes.

Jisr Az-Zarka is imprisoned by all the possible known techniques and the main entry is under the by-passing road and is too narrow for buses to enter. The village’s 13,000 inhabitants organize their own transportation to the rest of the country. The way they have to make every day takes hours, more than double the time it takes any other citizen.  The people of the village call it a Ghetto. The settlement has become a site for fiction films on life in Gaza, and is considered one of the poorest and backward villages inIsrael.

The coastal line has the highest value and the state desires it. Much effort is invested in the isolation and suppression of the inhabitants. It is the ongoing story of the turning of reclamation workers of the swamp into isolated foreign workers.

 

Chain accidents happen

on latitude 32 and longitude 34,

32 meters above sea level.

Man-made tectonics causes eruptions and inversions.

 

The accident in space and time

Space and time represent the events of the accident. The space is represented by the latitude life-line of the inhabitants who moved from the swamps to the village. Time is represented by the longitude travel along the rocks on the fast road. The fast road that serves the people, that anyway are not going to enter Jisr, and shapes the homeland landscape according to the laws of speed, efficiency, and state time. This time passes by Jisr Az-Zarqa, and the village remains entrapped behind. In this event different times on the same space intersect, collapse and disappear.

 

The accident of the ownership of the lands

The people of Jisr Az-Zarqa are land owners. The drying of the swamp was only partially successful. Their rights on this expensive land are practically an accident in the space of the ideology of the state. As one resident told me “for them we are stuck here.”

 

The accident of historical legacy

The fast road is formally justified as an economic saving, and was inspired by the mythological Roman sea-road. Paradoxically, while the coastal road expropriates land from the village, it also lies on the Roman aqueduct and blocks the entry of the water tunnel that leads into the village under the houses of the inhabitants. In this chain accident, in order to block entry to the settlement the adored Roman aqueduct is destroyed.

 

The real and most terrible accidents

Villagers are killed trying to cross the road that passes by them and never reaches them, separates them, and does not allow them proper entry, even under the village. Dozens are killed – children running after a lost football, workers trying to save time.

The crash of time

in eighty seconds.

Accidents happen on the surface.

Time crumbles.

Only the violated space remains.

Deep cross-sections of the local being

are exposed.

 

I my work ‘Orientatzia’ the latitudinal cross-section stretching from the Mediterranean to the Carmel Mount turned into an amphibian entity ‘extracted’ from the sea, built in one unit of layers of the sea and the land.

 

Installation: Orientatzia

Orientatzia is an entity of the between and betwixt,

a marine and continental amphibian.

It moves the sea and the land as one unit

extracted from a deep-time cross-section.

It moves inside.

Orientatzia moves inversely.

It moves eastward.

It contests the acts of imprisonment all around.

It has knowledge and memory of what happens.

Its layers are rocks, elevated underground water,

and the entrapped waters of the Tethys sea.

Intent, it moves from the sea toward the mountains.

To move it gathers the powers of will and endurance.

To free itself it recruits forces of adhesion and elevation.

It remembers scenes and voices – and moves,

a witness of its own condition.

The sea returns all.

Orientatzia moves eastward and restores

to the east what the sea gave back.

Orientatzia present findings found on the Jisr Az-zarka beach.

Moving, its layers twist and turn over.

It leaves its vertical position, and moves along its horizontal line.

It navigates its journey.

It is aware of its compass.

Without a destination it has a direction, inside, into its own, its place.

Moving, it liberates itself

and the solid and liquid blocks of which it is made,

and mainly the residents that live on

and shall go on living along this latitude.

 

‘Orientatzia’ offers a reading of a landscape and a social change. It is a reading of a topographic inversion of a hidden geology that aspires for its own externalization. It is a reading for making present what has already been destroyed, but has not vanished. Layers of repressed history are engraved and marked afresh.

I described here a point of breaking, in the language of navigation and cartography usually used for knowledge on a place, on the behavior of plants and its geological layers.

The story of the Akkub is not over yet. It still leads me. In Bedouin tradition the plant is called the whisperer, from the noise the rolling Akkub makes. As it moves freely among neighbors it becomes also a witness of the space and the movements in it. These movements hold potentiality for change.

Jisr is used to make films on Gaza, partly because of its landscape and proximity to the sea. The same sea is also the territorial space where the disaster of the flotilla that sailed from Turkey to Gaza happened. The morning after that horrible night I stood with a group of people in front of the sea, to protest, and to call, for the first time in my life, in the direction of the water. The grouping and the walking – fully dressed on the water-line close to the boats – filled me with many thoughts and images of historical events, of refugees, of occupation, of beginnings and transformations.