Topsoil

Description | Synopsis | Voice over texts | Installation requirements

The desert both as a concept and a concrete geographical site plays
a crucial role in Israeli communal identity. Since the famous 40
years of wandering through a desert as a preparation journey
before entering the promised land of milk and honey, the desert
occupies a significant space in Jewish collective memory as a place
of transition, both dangerous and promising, sacred and scary, not
compatible for actually living in, and basically quite an opposite to
financially and culturally prosperous life.
When the Zionist movement had put the foundations for the current
Israeli state, despite its rejection of all that is traditionally "Jewish",
the desert still symbolized the same romantic duality of spiritualism
and death. A major component of the Zionist project was, and still
is, the battle against the desert. Forestation and implantation
projects are part of controlling the desert, of disarming it from its
deadening features.

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