E&A projects Topsoil

The video consists of three short chapters:

“ Come With Me ” (3:00 min) - which refers to the optical illusion common to the desert - the mirage,

“ We Are Busy Creating A Desert, Which We Can Then Call Peace ” (2:40 min) - which describes the incident of shooting down a Libyan civillian aircraft that mistakenly strayed over the Sinai desert in 1973.

And “ A Report Of An Affected Country ” ( 2:10 min) which depicts a state fighting the desertification of its landscape.

The three pieces illustrate a story of a desert, an associative path from a distant and tempting place, through confrontation with reality, to a scientific, sober analysis, whose conclusion leads back to the starting point.

The installation consists of two main parts; a video trilogy displayed in three individual monitors and a sculpture- a model of desert landscape made of polystyren sheets, which served as a set for the video pieces. The video is completely artificial; the landscape is a synthetic model of a desert, and all other visuals in the video are either images downloaded from internet or pure digital manipulations.
The three monitors form a circle, and the "loop" which is immanent to the content of the work is imitated in the actual form of the viewing.

Installation view:
Sint Nikolaas Kapel, Amsterdam, September 2003
http://www.sandberg.nl/kapel/

"Topsoil" was shown at "DESERT" 6E MANIFESTATION INTERNATIONALE VIDÉO ET ART ÉLECTRONIQUE. MONTREAL, SEPTEMBER 20-27, 2004
VideoZone, the 2nd Bianalle for Video Art, Tel Aviv, november 2004
He'ara # , Migdal David, Jerusalem
The Desert Show, Gallery 400, Chicago