free movement
Freedom to move is the core of the political concept of Freedom. According to philosopher Hannah Arendt, in its original sense, freedom “meant nothing more than being able to go where one pleased.”* Besides physical freedom, claimed Arendt, in the political sphere moving also means free speech and freedom to start something new, and this freedom of movement is the substance and meaning of all political things and not the end purpose of politics, meaning that only where there is free movement can a political space occur.
Guava Platform short film Series
The Guava Platform experimental short film series is set in the fictive moment when the area’s borders and restrictions dissolve and people interact on walking roads via which they can now reach places they could not go before. In this time of transition, everything the characters have known will change. The short films in the series look into these moments, lingering on them to reveal and experience as many options as possible, leaving them open for change before they are determined.
Qunaytirah
Qunaytirah was the Syrian Golan Heights’ largest town. Its strategic location made it a crucial conflict point between Israel and Syria. The town was laid in ruins, and for Syrians, they came to symbolize the war with Israel and the area’s refugees. Omar Amiralay’s short film A Plate of Sardines is a poetic inquiry into the loss. Like A Day Becomes, the film departs from the characters’ personal narratives and cinematically reveals the layers of the landscape.
restrictions
Since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, Palestinians’ movements have been controlled by a system of rules and sanctions that includes limitations on entering private agricultural lands for harvesting, obtaining work permits, visiting relatives in Israel, partaking in family reunions, and accessing education.
connecting pieces of land
In the middle of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem, the state of Israel is promoting a Jewish settlement and archeological site under the name Ir-David, claiming that it has an archeological connection to the 3000-year-old biblical city of David. Based on this connection to biblical history, control has been taken over Palestinian houses and land, and Jewish rights have been demanded there.*
* For further information about Ir-David
Silwan
Ir-David is located in the middle of the Palestinian neighborhood Silwan,* next to the old city in the eastern part of Jerusalem. Since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Jerusalem in 1967, Jewish settlers have tried to reestablish their ownership of the occupied land in Silwan, first succeeding in 1987. Since many sections of the neighborhood were taken by force from Palestinians and public areas have been “privatized” into Jewish control. These Jewish demands and occupation of land in the neighborhood cause violence and tension between Jews and Palestinians in Silwan and act as a case study of Israel’s policy to gain control of the lands around the old city of Jerusalem. *
*For further information about Silwan
A Day Becomes
The name A Day Becomes is borrowed from a sixth-century Jewish Piyyut (Hebrew for a liturgical poem) by Yannai.* In Hebrew, the poem opens with the words ‘Karev Yom’ which can be translated to English in numerous ways. The official English translation – “Bring near the day that is neither day nor night” – relies on the understanding of Karev Yom as a prayer to God, asking him to bring near the day of Messianic redemption. But the Hebrew words might also be translated as a continual present: there is a day that neither progresses nor regresses but is always on the verge of becoming. This leaves aside notions of God as a force that can control time and bring a day nearer and keeps the name of the film in its present temporality of the becoming of a day.
* The first payyeṭan to employ rhyme and introduce his name in acrostics; he lived, probably in Palestine, in the first half of the sixth century.
The Golan Heights
The Israeli State occupied the Golan Heights during the 1967 Six-Day War and successfully annexed it in 1981 following the Golan Heights Law.
landscape and layers
“Here is no more (and no less) than our encounter, and what is made of it,”* writes geographer Doreen Massey. Places are entangled events of configurations and conjunctures with their own temporalities. Places are unique, she claims, because they constantly negotiate multiple here-and-nows of both humans and non-humans that together make a place. A place, Massey suggests, needs invention: it is always a challenge to respond to a temporary meeting with a place. She suggests encountering a place through its temporality, making it a meeting point for place and time. The thrown-togetherness, as she calls it, of a place makes it a sphere of relations that demands constant negotiation. This challenge of place acknowledges an openness of the future, a space that is always being made.
Where I live, hitting a wall is very common – literally reaching a point beyond which one is not allowed to continue. From every possible spot in the state of Israel, it is very likely that a twenty-minute drive in any direction will lead to a barrier. Following the length of a fence, one might arrive at a checkpoint where an Israeli soldier will restrict entrance or demand a special certificate for passage. In Israeli areas near the Gaza Strip or near the northern border with Lebanon and Syria, the Israeli citizen receives notice about their restricted movements before reaching an actual border: several kilometers before, a sign or an official will order them not to continue.
For Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the lack of free movement and the restrictions are beyond endurance, affecting both daily routines and possibilities in life. Palestinians cannot move freely without work permits, and even then, their movements are usually accompanied by a sense of humiliation, abuse, and fear. For over fifty years, residents of the Palestinian Occupied Territories have been constantly restricted by checkpoints, closures, sieges, and walls. The Guava Platform, initiated several years ago as a conceptual framework for my practice, is a platform for various art-actions. All of these actions – films, performance, participatory works, and research – challenge conventions regarding physical and conceptual movement where I live, east of the Mediterranean. The art-actions also examine the possibility of imagining the region open for movement.
This exposition suggests a way to re-think and re-feel the restricted place where I live through time-based art, as practiced in art-actions of the Guava platform. I call the art-actions in the platform ‘time-based-art’ because they are time-led and consider the passage of time an essential element. The films in the platform are time-based for other reasons as well: they have a beginning and an end, and are not an endless loop of moving images; they are directed as performative actions in the film, meaning they are filmed as live actions in a certain time-frame and place; they shoot a live-performance, rarely disturbed by the making of the film (for example, scenes are not divided into different shots, and the same shot is not filmed multiple times for the best possible take). All of the films in the platform thus appear in the present or what-is-to-come in the present time they happen. The proposition in this exposition follows the making and context of A Day Becomes, the third film in the platform’s short film series.
Since its establishment, the state of Israel has battled for the right to claim the land it occupies. One way to gain acknowledgement is by connecting pieces of land to Jewish and biblical history. The land on which Israel is established is one of the earliest known places of human life, where communities have built their homes continually for thousands of years. Because of this, abundant occupations and countless wars and power encounters have taken place on the site. The area was quite stable between the 13th and 20th centuries, during the Ottoman Empire.
Both of the previous films in the platform series, Guava (2014) and Sham (2016), began with a thought about the place they were filmed – the location and the landscape and layers of histories there. A Day Becomes began with a thought about time, about the first light of dawn, when the sun’s rays have yet to reach the landscape. A time when sight begins to reveal things, but the details are not yet clear. The film explores the landscape in which it is set during the elusive moment of the first light, seeking to recognize it as a realm of possibilities, to put aside the determinative restrictions placed on the land before and let it appear in its openness to what is about to arrive. To explore this suggestion, the film was conceived and constructed through time and its dynamics in the specific moments of daybreak.
A film thought through time is contemplated differently than a film thought through space. The first concern is how the film’s time relates to the time of the ‘world’: how do twenty-five frames per second of film contain or present a second of time on the clock? If A Day Becomes were in ‘real’ time, the events of the film would have lasted a few minutes. But the film does not advance at the pace of the clock. In the film, the duration of one second on the clock lasts anywhere from a split-second to a long moment. While time in the film follows how night evolves into day, it merely captures how the look of the landscape changes in the first light of dawn. Although the amount of light on the landscape increases as night changes to day, it does not follow the duration and pace of time in the ‘world’. Instead, the film seeks to pursue the duration of Yousef's experience of time as it unfolds the conversations and encounters Yousef has with his friends, lovers, and family.
The film captures how night strives to approach day through Yousef’s experience of being in this time. It follows Yousef, lingering with him in a moment of change he experiences in the film: a change in time and a change in the landscape. The film’s timescale seeks to reflect Yousef’s sense of time and history: What are the socio-political possibilities for understanding a place, when addressed via personal time experiences in it? How does the conflicted landscape in which Yousef has lived change when perceived in the final moments he spends on the land as he once knew it, a place (in the film) on the brink of change?
The transition is that between night and day, but also between the place as Yousef knew it and the unknown he is about to enter. It confronts him with everything he knew before and everything he expects to come. The film’s main – and only – character, Yousef is seen and heard during physical and verbal encounters with the people we chose, as though they were there with him. The conversations with them are not memories or fantasies, but real-time performed experiences in the present of the film. The time structured in the film traces Yousef’s time-consciousness of the moment performed in the film, aiming to rebuild his subjective experience of time at dawn.
The film’s duration is constructed according to Yousef’s intense experience of dawn’s flowing present by a continual return to the moment captured in the film as audio and visual. We returned several times to the same place of shooting in the building on the border of Qunaytirah. We recorded and filmed during dawn to collect numerous materials that would be edited into the time flow of his experience in one single becoming of a day, and it was divided into four main categories.
The first were visual performative encounters, where each meeting was filmed in a separate room; Yousef’s recordings and verbal interactions, each in a separate room; a collection of audio of all ‘live’ things in and around the building, including the wind in the leaves and any animals we could find; and finally, visual records of Yousef moving in the corridors of the building at dawn.
Each scene of Yousef at dawn was based on a different encounter: with his father, his sister, his Jewish best friend from high school, his Jewish ex-wife, the first Palestinian/Arab woman he had sex with. In our preparation phase, each planned encounter was translated into a physical performative gesture developed from a specific memory. For his sister for example, this was a wedding they had been to during which she constantly hung on his arm. His complex reaction to that reflected his urge to hold and protect her, but also his desire to get rid of her – both for his own sake and for her own freedom. For Yousef, this moment distilled the essence of their relationship. Yousef used and handled the physicality of her hanging on his arm and his entangled reaction to her as the performative action for the scene. The gestures in each scene embodied Yousef’s memories in performative actions, and this physical interpretation brought his past to the present of the film.
But at the beginning of the 20th Century the area was occupied by the British and French, who took territory from the Ottomans. They randomly divided the land east of the Mediterranean with the northern area, including contemporary Lebanon and Syria, going to the French mandate and the southern area – now Israel – to the British mandate. Today’s West Bank and East Jerusalem belonged to Jordan. Since 1948, when Israel was established and the mandates left the land, more than fifty battles have been fought between Israel and its neighboring countries, resulting in thousands of corpses. As a resident of the state of Israel for over thirty years, I keep questioning the loop of ownership and justification of this land that constantly leads to more wars – especially since simply by living here, I am part of and contribute to the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians . The art-actions of the Guava Platform thus seek to re-think and re-feel the conditions and possibilities of inhabiting this piece of land and inquiring what else, if anything, could be a way to live here.
A Day Becomes is set in The Golan Heights in the few moments when night becomes day. The film’s protagonist, Yousef Sweid, walks into the dawn through a four-story building with multiple rooms and corridors. The building was built in 1962 as the Qunaytirah governor’s headquarters and occupied by the Israeli army in the war of 1967. It was used by Israeli military forces for several years, but today it is a ruin overlooking what remains of the old town of Qunaytirah. During Yousef’s walk through the building, he engages physically and verbally with people and moments from his life and past. The film is based on the performer’s own life experience and his encounters in the film are related to Yousef’s biography. Yousef is a Christian Palestinian, born in Haifa in 1976. He was educated in a Jewish school in his hometown and later studied theatre at Tel Aviv University, which is where we met and became friends and colleagues. He is a local and international actor who divides his life between Israel and Germany, where his Jewish son and ex-wife live.
Yousef and I chose people and interactions from his life that he wanted to confront during his walk through the building. First, we explored who the most important people for him to converse with were during this time of change. I then asked Yousef to write an encounter or interaction characteristic of his relationship to these people. Working from his writings, we selected specific interactions to reference in the conversations in the film. The film shows only Yousef's side of these interactions; while he is clearly interacting with others, only his movements and voice are observable. The conversations are not flashbacks; it is as though the others are in the building with him.
The building is located close to the contemporary border with Syria. Yousef grew up in Israel and has thus never been in Syria. In the film, Yousef is on the verge of leaving the land he knows for an unfamiliar place, and the film depicts his final moments in the landscape as he has known it.
The filmed and recorded material amounted to over twenty hours, and the next step was to understand how these parallel time flows could be edited into a single duration of Yousef’s time-experience of the dawn in the film.
The time explored in the edited film flows through Yousef, and it is difficult to determine whether he is in control of or controlled by the encounters. The film is loaded with Yousef’s many confrontations of the same moment both in sound and in image. At times, he listens and converses; sometimes he ignores and screams; at other times, he is silenced by the encounters or by the sounds of the landscape around him. The unclear orientation creates uncertainty: what is the next step? Where is Yousef going? His time experience isn’t led by the chronology of the passing events: in the film, all the scenes occur simultaneously. Ultimately, it is difficult to determine if his performance is related to his memories or his desires for the future. Past and future collapse into Yousef’s present experience of time as he walks from darkness to light. Daylight advances steadily, but slower than in the time flow outside of his experience. The film’s time is edited and constructed in relation to Yousef’s reactions in his performance. The pace of time changes throughout the film relative to how Yousef experiences and handles his encounters and his movement towards the unknown landscape he is approaching.
The same dawn in which Yousef is walking in the film was captured in image and in sound over twenty times. He returns again and again to the same moment where he leaves the place as he knew it and walks towards another place. All of these returns were edited to become a single dawn, continuously drawing closer to daylight, but also loyally following Yousef’s experience of his flow of time. The dynamic pace of the edited flow moves from dense experiences to scattered instances of time.
Each visual scene was first edited separately, and each verbal encounter cut into a coherent conversation. Connections were slowly drawn between the visual returns, taking into consideration the amount of light in the moment of the current scene, but more importantly connecting gestures, tensions, and the pace of Yousef’s movement. Similarly, the conversations were edited to address content, but more thoroughly his intonation, speed of speech, and his verbal energy. The final part of the editing process was to connect the visual and audio layers. Connecting the edited layers sought to find the inner links between Yousef’s performances of the filmed and reordered scenes.This entailed searching for links between the different actions in each performance and connections between the actions and the conversation audio, looking for similarities and contrasts between the visual and the audio that would reconstruct his embodied time experience. This structure incorporates various dynamics of pace and comprises relations and interactions between the recorded visuals and audio. The edit correlated all the performative actions and conversations as if they occurred in a single flow of the moment. The film’s form suggests how Yousef experienced the moment of dawn, unfolding everything with which Yousef arrived in this present flow and wished to reflect on his experience.
The intense return to the same present moment in image and sound of the film was edited into a continual dawn following Yousef’s embodied experience of these few minutes. The intensity and form of Yousef’s physical and verbal encounters with moments and characters of his past changed throughout the film. The film moves seamlessly between the changing occurrences in the film, at times led by the actions in the performances and at other times guided by the sound of his voice. Yousef’s encounters vary from extremely full to very narrow, where the flow of time either expands beyond the chronological time that passes in the film or mimics chronological time as it is experienced outside the film. The film moves between these extremes, never in a single direction, which lets the past burst into the present of the film as an unwanted visitor, allowing the past to spread through it.
Throughout the film, Yousef’s movement in the spatiality of the building and the landscape follows how the movement unfolds from his experience of time. Until the final shot of the film, when the viewer sees the building from the outside, there is no way to determine where he is in space – only where he is in his particular time experience. But when the film ends and the sun rises, Yousef is no longer visible nor audible. Only the building is left. Time is once again represented merely by spatial chronology, by the sun’s path over the landscape. The film ends without recounting if or how he left the building and how his journey continued. Only the landscape is there, intertwined with his experience.
Time
Director Andrei Tarkovsky claims that the innovation of cinema gave birth to a new aesthetic principle. For the first time in art history, time could be captured directly, by printing it on celluloid film. Tarkovsky believed this allowed viewers to perceive life through the movement of time, meaning that film exists in time, but time also comes to life inside it: “The image becomes authentically cinematic when (amongst other things) not only does it live within time, but time also lives within it, even within each separate frame.”*
Yousef's time-consciousness
Writing about the intimate relationship between time and one’s subjectivity, philosopher Merleau-Ponty stated, “Time is someone.”* The experience of time presupposes someone experiencing time – so time is a result of one’s relationship to things and not a flow that occurs around someone who records it. To be conscious, he claims, is the action of temporality; the flux of time as a process flows through a person during the process of living. Time has meaning to us because we ‘are’ time: “It is through time that being is conceived, because it is through the relations of time-subject and time-object that we are able to understand those obtaining between subject and world.”**
*Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. 422.
chronology
Peaks of present, Deleuze argues, are chronosigns of simultaneous accents: “a present of past, a present of present and a present of future” within a film.* In these scenes, time is never a succession of passing presents, and as for that it is unable to be explained or accounted for. Instead, time as it appears in peaks of present is a system of relativity, claimsDeleuze “a plurality of worlds, constituting the universe”**. In this time structure one and the same event is played out in different worlds. These are not points of view of the same world, he suggests, but different worlds implicated in one event. Peaks of present are moments in films of a perpetual present cut off from its temporality. These are structures of time in film, that are disconnected from the chronology of time, and instead contain mutual worlds that are in relation within a certain event.
moments and characters
Bergson claims that recalling past events shortens their duration and makes them ‘things’ so people can picture them to themselves. But time and the duration of time needs to be lived, not pictured, he argues; one needs to be in the flow of time, not shorten events and remove them from a flow or make them into something to put in a box and look at. Shortening is not possible unless one attempts to determine what is about to come. “One is bound to live this duration whilst it is unfolding.”* Bergson argues that living through the unfolding of time is duration. Duration dismisses the necessity of determination; it is placing oneself into the very moment of the act without “foreseeing the act before it is performed or reasoning about the possibility of the contrary action once the deed is done.”** Bergson insists that time is fundamentally different from space, and only thinking through pure duration implies that the future is open.
25 frames per second
Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Funes the Memorious” explores the life experience of Funes, whose memory is so good that he remembers every instance and object as it was experienced, and can not generalize. I wanted the structure of the very short film A Day in April (2009) to relate to Funes’ unique time experience. Every frame in the film was represented by an image I had shot on a single day. I took more than 1500 pictures on that day, and they were edited, twenty-five frames per second, to follow that day in April.
flowing present
Philosopher Henri Bergson continued Husserl’s research in the experience of time, claiming its disconnection from space more distinctively. Connecting time with space, he claims, takes away its flow – or in his words, “the duration of time”. Duration is a heterogeneous succession of our consciousness without distinction, not a homogenous spatial time, but “an interconnection and organization of elements, each one of which represents a whole, and cannot be distinguished or isolated from it except by abstract thought.”* Duration is not a succession of present moments arranged as past-present-future, but a flow in which chronology collapses. Qualitative changes melt into each other without affiliation, and as such, they gather in a continuous, immeasurable multiplicity. There are reciprocal relations, in a durational flow, he claims: the past is part of the present which becomes the future. In duration, past-present and future are connected and related through a flow of time. In his research, Bergson sought to articulate a philosophy that thinks through time. One cannot grasp the unceasing flux of reality with a static, readymade concept. Geographer Doreen Massey compared her suggestion of a temporality of place to Bergson’s proposition of duration. In her book For Space, she claims that if Bergson describes Duration as throwing oneself into the past, then her suggestion of thrown-togetherness is like throwing oneself into the spatial.
pace of time
Philosopher Gilles Deleuze claims that the chronosigns of ‘sheets of past’ contain temporality “in a form of coexisting large regions to be explored.”* Sheets of past have a chronological course of the presents to which they refer. These routes coexist in what Deleuze refers to as regions, best explained as parallel layers of time. All layers of time, he claims, coexist in relation to the actual present in which they appear. The chronosign sheets of pastsubordinates movement to time. This is in regard to chronological-spatial time, where time is subsidiary to movement. In other words, the coexisting regions of past, the sheets, enable movement between them. To allow movement, all the sheets of past connect to a certain actual moment in the present. Like the crest of a wave holdxing together the rest of the wave, this movement empowers once one enters it. “As soon as we reach the sheets of past it is as if we were carried away by the undulations of a great wave.”** Deleuze claims that time gets out of joint in these chronosigns, and instead one enters temporality; for Deleuze, this means a permanent crisis. The transformation between the coexisting layers changes depending on which layer one currently experiences. As a result, the present is no longer the center of evocation; instead, movement is probabilistically carried between the sheets. This implies that chronosigns produce something new from the movement inherent in them “whether in the deciding between them, or at the edge of undecidability.”***
Arendt, Hannah.The Promise of Politics, trans. Kohn Jerome. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 2007.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2001.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema: 2 The time image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, trans. James Churchill, ed. Martin Heidegger. Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1973.
Massey, Doreen. For Space. Los Angeles: SAGE, 2015.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.
Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. London: Bodley Head, 1986.
Yousef’s sense of time and history
Philosopher Edmund Husserl described the phenomenology of time as ‘a lived experience’. He distinguished between time in its spatial appearance – as a sundial for example – and the inner experience, and believed that time as it appears in space (i.e. objective time, outside of people experimenting it) is timeless, occurring in a now and with no flow of duration. Time as assumed by experience is not an objective, ‘real’ time of the world but “an immanent time of the flow of consciousness”. According to Husserl, the time one presumes in the flow of time-consciousness is an actual present of representative phantasy in which one represents a past or future as present. It is thus an experience of time that does not advance chronologically, but a present in which both a future and a past are literally re-presented. In the flow of time-consciousness, the present contains an image of the past that was and the potential of what will come.*
parallel time flows
edited flow
Deleuze suggests that a work of art may invent paradoxical, hypnotic, and imaginary sheets whose property is at once in the present and always to come. The attempt in cinema to sketch a present prevents the past in it from being a mere recollection. Each of the chronosigns summons all the mental functions simultaneously and “What is loaded with all these functions, each time, is feeling.”* The chronosigns are layers of past experienced in the present of the film. The regions of past that appear in films prompt feelings by moving between them. The various relations between the sheets circulate from one sheet to another in continual exchange. Cinema is a place where direct confrontation of chronosigns, interrelations between past-present-future, takes place independent of any fixed point in space.