The Wall, sedimentations

That the memory of the victorious recognize the memory of the defeated.

                                                                                                                     Adonis

            The construction of walls which divide people seem to belong to past ages. History makes us remember in the form of books, museums and even oral witnesses, the horror of segregation in the past and examples of it are not scarce.

How in a globalized society where the world is tending towards communication through networks can a physical wall be built?

The operation “Security fence”, a fortified line that separates Cisjordania and Israel, started at the beginning of 2002 as a result of the political success of Ariel Sharon. He had convinced the USA to consider the struggle against the Intifada as part of the American struggle against international terrorism, which emerged after the 11th September 2001.

“The violent acts of the Second Intifada, a result of the violent repression of the demonstrations that condemned the visit of Ariel Sharon (at that time head of the opposition in charge of the Likud, right wind party) to the plain of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem are the inevitable response of the Palestinian to the impossibility of any political perspective”. J. F. Legrain

Despite the security reasons that Israel used to justify the construction and development of the wall, the actual results are in fact the isolation of ghetto-cities separated among themselves, whose inhabitants are lacking in the most fundamental rights of free expression and movement, self government, national identity, etc. and in which Israeli Army has a permanent and unilateral right of interventional control.

A nation of birds without wings as the poet Mahmud Darwish said, whose territory is progressively reduced at the rate of one Palestinian home destroyed a day. This untenable situation continues and the ” factual realities”, as euphemistically are called the actions that the State of Israel takes in defiance of the recommendations of the United Nations, are progressively imposed.

The end goal seems to be reaching a political situation of no return where the coexistence of two different states as often quoted by the UN Security Council would be impossible.

The photographic project

The purpose of my work has been documenting the wall and the situation that its presence engenders. To this purpose I wanted to record the sedimentations of the conflict and the segregation. This means, my photographs captures architectures, landscapes, ruined façades, abandoned streets without transit, constructions sites stopped in time.

 I tried to document the mesh of silence that exists underneath the routine of daily life. That absence, which is present in the pictures troubles us and urges us to enquire as to its origin. People are not presented in the pictures. Memory, desolation, emptiness and absence occupy the space. The mass media has made us unaccustomed to reflection and absence. A certain “horror vacui” characterizes them and every new image must be more explicit than the previous one in order to catch and maintain the spectator’s attention.

Every day we see on TV news the horror of war. However by approaching the conflict from another angle we can understand the suffering in another way.

The pictures in this series are foreign to the sensationalist ways of the current media discourse on the conflict. Pictures that takes us apart of the continuous news bombing, which are so shallow, so numerous and fragmented that instead of inform they uninform us.