Lawless Lines

Overview

The Oslo Process defined three types of territories within the West Bank: Area A under Palestinian control, area B under Israeli military control and Palestinian civilian control, and area C under full Israeli control. When the process collapsed and the temporary organization of occupied territories solidified into a permanent splintered geography of multiple separations and prohibitions, a fourth territory suddenly emerged. It dwells in between all the other boundaries and spans, the width of the line that separates each zone. Less than a millimeter thick when marking a map to the scale of 1:20,000, in reality, it measures 5.5 meters.

The installation explores the thickness of this line, and follows it along edges of villages and towns, across fields, orchards, roads, gardens, kindergartens, fences, terraces, homes, public buildings, a football stadium, a mosque and finally a large recently built castle. Within this line is a zone undefined by law, a legal limbo that pulls in like a vortex all different forces, institutions, organizations and characters that operate within and around it. In the thickness of the line might become an extraterritorial territory, perhaps “all that remains” from Palestine, a thin but powerful space for potential political transformations.

Political spaces in Palestine operate through legal blanks. Investigating the clash of geopolitical lines onto the domestic space of a house, operating between architecture, cartography and legal practice, this installation brings up a legal case that calls for an anarchic regime of political autonomy to inhabit this line. From these small tears in the territorial system, the entire system of divisions might be finally torn down.


2011

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 10

Co-produced by Sharjah Art Foundation, in collaboration with UNESCO, Battir Landscape Office and Al Quds-Bard Honors College

Credits

Research: Nicola Perugini
Video: Amina Bech
Comics: Samir Harb