The floor work is a continuity that has been violated and broken, and where fusion and reconstruction are taking place. The work demonstrates an attempt to decipher the violation, but also the wish for re-solidification.
The tile has the dimension of a marker. It marks height, defines what is above and below. It serves a conventional scale, but not for exact measurement. It is also the boundary mark of my childhood, when public building of institutions and accommodation flourished (the Hebrew term for tiles was ‘Balatot’); but also when a severe national and political fissure took place.
Defenseless, it has a designed-architectural meaning as a bloc and as continuity; a pallet carrying those who trod on it, who rub themselves against it; a texture that paradoxically can define the delimiting lines between what moves and lives and what is still, enclosed and pressed underneath. This duality led the production of the floor work at the new workshop at the Ein Harod museum. In this way the tension it harbors between assimilating in the continuity and unexpected separation from it was preserved, thus exposing the hidden (Mitachat La-Balata hints to hiding things under the tile) and the digression from the symmetrical.
Beyond its representational functions however, when it is unassumingly laid in every backyard merely as an excess, or serves as a substitute object, its essence is taken from it, and it appears in all its meaninglessness and existential passivity (Rosh Balata, the Hebrew for empty-headedness).
As a scale the floor turns into a model, an above-view, not too distant and unpretentious, disunited and doubting. In this way the floor work can be perceived as a dynamic scale for a structure, town, land, world – one that uncovers the tension between getting fixed and loss of orientation – one that tells on the blurring of boundaries. The blur violates the original technical functioning of the scale, and disrupts its meaning as a tool for moral and political evaluation.

Relli De Vries