Language Resurrection

The work consists of six A5 40-page notebooks originally made in Jordan. At the time I made the works, there were forest fires all along the Mediterranean basin, in Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Lebanon. On the radio there were endless reports emphasizing how climate and politics are connected. I started collecting words and phrases that helped mediate what was happening, for example: “arson,” “a malicious hand,” “national disaster,” and more. Politically recruited language. I wrote them down using letter stencils. Realizing that I was identifying an organized semantic field, I sought to reveal the mechanism that was directing, operating and transmitting it. I accumulated more and more words and sentences. The sixth notebook is an index of the words in the first five notebooks. Each notebook is a separate work. In the exhibition of the same name, Revival of the Language, the notebooks moved to the wall [Revival of the Language, Ami Steinitz Gallery, February 1999). I also created a work for the exhibition “Extraordinary Charge” based on these notebooks (curator: Michal Shechnai, Gallery of Israeli Art, Kiryat Tivon Memorial Center, April 2021).