Plombir

Vardit Gross: Last summer you published a book about Soviet ice cream. You are a thoroughly Israeli painter– how did you even come up with this?

Elad Rosen: A few years ago I was looking for ice cream near my studio in south Tel Aviv, and as always, my eye is drawn to all kinds of esoterica. What won out here was the combination of esoterica and cheap ice cream.

And then you started hunting for them?

I usually begin putting things up online pretty quickly. At a fairly early stage, I started uploading photos of the ice cream in the format of a story where I hold them in my hand, just a photo of an ice cream cone with a strange wrapper. And then slowly I also began adding words, a kind of critique of their taste – not chocolatey enough, too many raisins. I moved it to Facebook because I felt it was more of a project for that platform than for Instagram. In the book I kept the same flow, and what started as a short text with comments about the thickness of the waffle cone kept getting longer until it became an excuse for me to write small essays. What attracted me to keep going with “Plombir” type ice creams, beyond the commitment to the joke of it all, is that for the price, it is actually a good, high-quality ice cream. Rich, from the Magnum family, and very cheap.

Could you explain to readers the meaning of the name “Plombir”?

Plombir is the name of a style of ice cream. Originally Plombir is a cream-flavored ice cream, what the Italians call Fiori de Latte. Over the years, the style of Plombir ice cream (made with vanilla, cream, eggs, and sugar) developed into this specific style, and comes in a variety of flavors.

And they are really different. Lots of unexpected flavors pop up while browsing through the book. What’s the strangest flavor you’ve come across?

I think it’s a tie between cola and bubble. These were really the worst ice creams.

But have you finished them?

Yes. When I start something – I finish it. I even bought the bubble flavor twice because I had to photograph it again.

I understood from you that there is even a public statue of Plombir somewhere.

In Zhytomyr, a city in northeastern Ukraine, the city where Haim Nachman Bialik was born and where Meir Dizengoff served in the army. It’s the ice cream capital of Ukraine. Zhitomir’s butter factory is there, a relic of the Soviet era, and for several years now has been called the Rud factory after its manager, which is also a very Soviet thing – to name a factory after the manager. Many of the city’s residents work in the factory, and probably due to its centrality, there is an ice cream monument in the main square – the largest ice cream statue in the world! A cone with four granite balls in different colors – all of them natural granite colors – symbolizing the different ice cream flavors.1

With all this visual wealth – why did you decide to show only the wrappers and not the ice cream itself in the book?

The original Facebook project also had the ice cream. With the transformation to a book, we made the decision to unify the text and image, which also stemmed from the consideration that the book would not be too big. There are some photographs of the ice cream, but the book gives more of a platform to the wrappers.

The book was published only in Hebrew, while most art books in Israel are published in Hebrew and English, or even in English with a Hebrew insert, sometimes also in Arabic, and in this case Russian would have been a good option.

The decision for a single language was mainly for reasons of budget. But beyond that – this is really a project of an Israeli tasting post-Soviet ice cream in Israel. When the real story is how this ice cream, and how the immigration itself, came and was absorbed here. I don’t know how relevant it is to other audiences.

Considering the fact that you are actually a painter, this project is very far from your regular practice, and in the end it is the one featured in your first artist’s book. Can you put your (sticky-from-ice-cream) finger on the motivation?

The fact that it is far from my practice is already an excellent motivation. What I do is very defined – I paint in the studio, but sometimes I get away from it – whether it’s ceramics, or curating an exhibition like the miniature golf exhibition at the Bat Yam Museum, or the exhibition on inspiration and spiritual ancestors in the New Gallery, or the online project I did where I painted everything I ate every day for a period of time. Painting is the main practice but I also really need these breaks from it – to get out of my comfort zone and do other things that interest me. I also wrote about this in the introduction to the book – for me, art is being interested in something, it’s being curious. In this case there was an active curiosity.

You moved from social media to book – and that brings me back to the question of what is actually more “eternal.” We are used to thinking of a book as something eternal – a treasure buried in the National Library, preserved for hundreds of years, but in the end you printed 500 copies, which are scattered among people’s homes, compared to posts that can remain for years on social networks and garner hundreds and thousands of likes.

I don’t know about eternal life – but I do know about life in the world. The whole ice cream project is ultimately a rather modest project, but this book has, as have books and things that come out at Artport, gained some status in the world. Which is also something I like to do – to take things that can be considered a joke and turn them into things in the world. The interview I had in Haaretz, for example, would not have happened if it were about a Facebook project, but it did happen with the book. So yes, life in the world.

Are you aware if, after the project, more people started trying Soviet ice cream?

One of the things with social networks but not a book is the interaction with the audience. A dynamic was created (with the Facebook posts) with Israelis discovering the ice cream along with me or through me, tasting it for the first time and talking about it, and on the other hand there are the Israelis with more recent roots in the post-Soviet space who were talking about the ice cream as something that was part of their childhood – a memory from home. A memory that is sometimes nostalgic and pleasant, and sometimes repellant, something they want to run as far as they can from in order to assimilate into Israeli society.

One of my favorite things about the book is the sticker on the wrapping: it looks like a nutritional label you would find on ice cream, but actually contains a lot of details about the book itself, such as where it was printed and the number of copies.

I’m glad you liked it! Most people didn’t notice that it was part of the design and concept.

But there’s a problem, because not only do most people miss it, to get to the book you pretty much have to tear off the plastic and then you end up throwing away the sticker with all these details.

True, it is not really reusable.

Yes, this information is not found inside the book.

The idea of ​​the sticker was a solution that came from a budgetary constraint and joint thinking with the book’s designer, Yoav Weinfeld. The original idea was to make a permanent jacket out of transluscent parchment paper, and put the information sticker on it, but that increased the budget by hundreds of percent. So this was some sort of compromise, which I’m not sure works. After having seen people take it off or tear the sticker in front of me without noticing it was even there, now, when I sell or give a copy, I don’t use the plastic covering with the sticker.

You mentioned Yoav Weinfeld who designed the book. I know he was an important part of the process. One of the decisions you made was for a small format book, and you also worked on a very tight schedule.

Yes, Yoav was flexible and creative and made the project happen on an impossible schedule. I wanted the book to be as close as possible in size to a popsicle. The cover is also inspired by one of my favorites – the classic Plombir.

And what are you eating this summer?

This summer I am staying put at Yad Eliyahu, because we had a baby, so I am less around the ice creams of south Tel Aviv. And the truth is that since the war in Ukraine the whole business has taken a bit of a dark turn. The playful joy about it is much less. At the peak of the project I also traveled there.

It could be that the book is really a kind of time capsule for a certain period, because I'm sure there are new ice creams coming out all the time.

The latest interesting development I have seen is the arrival of ice cream from Azerbaijan. Beyond that, there is also a series of completely Israeli Plombir – not Ukrainian. For me, the Soviet wrappers were the thing that was the most charming. Now the design is like Israeli popsicles, and the flavors are also much more Israeli. It’s all a little less esoteric.

Who did you dedicate the book to?

I dedicated it to my partner Noam. Now I can also dedicate it to my son Yam.

Actually, all three books of your partner Noam Partum’s poetry feature one of your works on the cover. Have you ever thought of adding more inside the book?

No. But I would be happy for us to do something together.

Making a book is like...

Having an anxiety attack.

Who should we invite next to the magazine?

I think Rotem Rozenboim should publish a book about his AI project and then interview him :) and Zvi Tolkovsky.