Sentenced to Life 40×40 משפט לחיים

All photos from Sokolovsko are by Leszek Krutulski

videos from Contexts 2012, Sokolovsko Festival of Ephemeral Art, Poland

About “40×40/Sentenced To Life”

approx. 3 hours

40x40cm is the size of the tiles of our kitchen floor. What crossed my mind when I chose them as objects of my performance piece, is how any area delineated by tiles can immediately take on a semblance to an inside space; a space that can align itself, as a separate entity, from the outdoors, is to me a reassurance of home, just as the remaining tiles of a house from Roman times, or more recently, a Palestinian home, are remains of an irrevocable presence.

I began working on this performance piece during a period of my life when my husband and I had to relocate ourselves from our original home. Daniel had become handicapped following a brain tumor, as a consequence of his service in the IDF 35 years earlier, and I was bound to a repetitious task of finding us alternative flats, spacious enough to facilitate the movement of a wheelchair, and other disabled aids.

I suppose a dire consciousness of Home motivated me to order 28 wooden tiles, the size of our kitchen tiles, from a carpenter.

I chose to work in the park by the river, near our rented flat; this is how wild hedges, mountain slopes and natural locations continued to be the appropriate locations for the performance, except for very few instances when a well-sized gallery or a hall would do.

The performance would start at a landmark that rendered a panoramic view. At a far point, on the banks of the river, or by a tree on the mountain slope, recognized by a red head scarf and shirt, I would disassemble a stack of piled tiles, aligning them one after another, to become a white path through the grass and hedges.

On my knees behind the cubical stack of tiles, I bended forward and began unfolding the tiles; I let the fingers of one hand search the sheets of wood, from the top of the pile to its bottom, while my other hand lay gently on top of the pile. When my fingers could feel the earth under the last tile, I set two hands firmly on both sides of the bottom of the cubic stack and lifted it, slowly and carefully, opening a space symmetric and parallel to the tile attached to the ground, then, moving the stack steadily in the air, I set it right in front of the tile that I had exposed on the ground. With my body tilting forward, I advanced placing my two knees, one after the other, on to the very 1^st tile of the path, and then, again, with my body behind the stack, I repeated the sequence, diligently, until I exposed another tile from the bottom of the pile and advanced myself with the advancing path. In this manner, in precision, one tile after the other, I formed a white path of 28 winding piles amongst the green.

During the three hour duration o the performance, the audience could watch from any distance, angle, or point of view they chose. They came nearer when they realized that I will remain in a distance; some seated themselves beside the forming path, others stood following my activity with quiet discussion amongst themselves, and others, watching attentively, had evolved a dialogue of gazes with me. The last tile on the path, the 28^th in number, exposed a red X that marked the entire area of the tile; I placed my knees on it, one after the other, making room for both hands, and remained there, on the marked tile, as if pondering over it. Then I crawled onto the grass, and left the path and the audience behind.

I made it a rule that I must keep to the position of the knees on the ground at all times, and that my hands were to maneuver my movements ahead, on the diagonal, sideways and backward; I moved on all fours, letting my hands set the direction in a diagonal, at an even stride, one hand, then another, and then knees, progressing farther and farther into the meadow. At moments, I did slightly change the angle of my bearing, at other times slowing down then stopping momentarily, then looking back and then ahead to discern a direction, and finally I let my body lay to rest on the ground; I lay there enough time for the audience to recognize my image as the sprout of red in the green.

When I rose back on all fours, it was the only time that I had let my knees navigate; I was crawling backwards up to the apparent red X on the nearest tile.

Having reached the last tile in a backward knee stride, I turned around and placed myself facing the path and the audience: with both hands on each side of the last tile, I slid the tile smoothly on top of the tile before it, and so, progressively, I began erasing the path. Having reached the 17^th tile, I turned it over and revealed, for the briefest moment, a portrait of an elderly lady on its other side, then I continued onto the next tile. Then again, to the next, until the entire path disappeared. I was now standing on my knees, a cube in front of me and a red X on top of it.

The smallest nuances in an activity made visible my attitudes and state of mind, rather than my ideas: meddling with a tile and perking up the earth underlying it to keep it from sliding or overlapping another tile; when aligning the tiles, leaving the rough outline of green weeds and small branches in between the smooth alignment of the tiles; revealing the image of the elderly woman, always a difficult confrontation and therefore so briefly done.

The activities of the crawling woman in red, carrying, assembling, and disassembling tiles, was only enhanced in my correspondence with the various sites; different locations inspired new arrangements of tiles, but some arrangements always remained; a path, of tiles, leading nowhere, and a path, of tiles, erased; tiles as patches to lay my limbs on; tiles as places to be relocated; an area – of tiles – to be retrieved by my body; tiles as enclosures of reminisces.