In a series of guest posts, writer and Walker tour guide Christine McVay shares her experiences traveling to Tel Aviv for the SupraSpace conference on June 3 and 4, 2012.

Israel’s Separation Barrier reminded me of the Berlin Wall–pumped up and on a bender. I could see the barrier that divides Israel from the West Bank all over the place. It meanders like a river, forming oxbows around Palestinian villages; sometimes it even goes in circles. On my maps, it actually showed up, but not always following the Green Line. Instead, in some places the wall wandered inside the West Bank, appearing to cartographically incorporate blobs of it into Israel proper.

Image courtesy of John W. Stephenson

The Separation Barrier is not just an artifact of visual culture, of course.  It effectively divides people from people and from places. Yamin, a Palestinian guide, took a group of us to visit a farmer, Abd al Rabbeh, who said the wall is cutting off his farm land from the Al Walaja village where he lives.

If he stays in town, he said, he can’t tend his olive trees. But if he neglects them, he loses them.  In his village, Palestinians can’t get building permits from the Israeli authorities for their homes but unpermitted homes are demolished.  It sounded to me like Catch-22 all over again.

Abd seems to receive visitors from everywhere. We signed  an already internationally-autographed guest book. We admired his hand-watered garden. We shared hummus. We looked up the hill where bulldozers were kicking up dust, inching across a ridge line, moving closer, I suppose, to surrounding the village.  Meanwhile, Abd said that the pigeons can go everywhere. And back in Bethlehem you can buy a newfangled souvenir olive wood nativity scene with a miniature Separation Barrier built right in.

Previously:  Magic Maps

Next:  Traveling Bodies

In a series of guest posts, writer and Walker tour guide Christine McVay shares her experiences traveling to Tel Aviv for the SupraSpace conference on June 3 and 4, 2012.

The first thing that confused me about the West Bank is that it lies east of Israel. It’s also hard to explain where or what it is without referencing an unfinished and ongoing history, and without using loaded terms. I’ll venture that the West Bank I visited is the territory occupied by Israel after the 1967 (Six-Day) War and separated from it by the Green (or 1949 Armistice Agreement) Line. Its name refers to its location on the Jordan River, not to its direction relative to Israel. While there, I had trouble knowing where I really was.

Since 1993 it has been divided into three parts: there are areas controlled by Israel, others by the Palestinian Authority, and a third mixed type that I never understood. The first two are mutually exclusive:  Fred, my Israeli tour guide, told me he wasn’t allowed in Area A, nor was his car with its yellow license plates on certain highways. The Palestinian guides were barred from Area C, nor were their green-plated vehicles allowed on many roads and bypass tunnels.

Road tunnel near Bethlehem

On the road I saw checkpoints, sometimes apparently unattended; concrete blocks between Areas, and  confounding bypass roads that segregated Palestinian and Israeli traffic into separate but presumably equal flows.

“Internationals” like me could, I think, go anywhere, although my Lonely Planet warned about certain notorious checkpoints, car rental issues and so on. To go with local guides whose movements were restricted called for a logistics of pickups and drop offs, meeting points and waits at local tea shops. Normally I use travel maps to show where I’ve been and where I’m going. But in the West Bank, travel maps failed me. They never showed where C ended and A (or even B) began.

Instead, they smoothed the West Bank out into one undifferentiated region, unmarked by Israeli areas, Palestinian areas, or by the barriers and agricultural gates that control traffic.  Their keys described the number of lanes each road held and how it was surfaced, but left out who was allowed to use it or whether you could get there from here in the vehicle you were in.

Except for one page in Lonely Planet that showed the largest,  my travel maps also left uncoded contentious places where people live, like the refugee camps that have existed in the West Bank for more than sixty years. What my paper map called “El Balata” could have been another ancient Arab village, instead of a community of 30,000 Palestinians under United Nations administration.  My downloaded  map called the “Ayda Camp Gate” to the refugee camp in Bethlehem a “tourist attraction”–making my images of the children living there another global voyeur’s souvenir–which, of course, they are.

Aida Refugee Camp

Mostly, the refugee camps just didn’t show up on maps. On the ground, though, they were very materially there–concrete and treeless. In the Balata Refugee Camp outside Nablus, the tour guide Majdi told me the original tents had been simply replicated in concrete. Three generations have grown up there, he said, and few have the money to get out; the kids are traumatized by the violence they’ve known; the Women’s Center is trying to build a playground so mothers can use its services. To me it seemed like a lot of issues in a well-populated place that barely registers in the visual culture.

The many Israeli settlements also appeared on my maps simply as towns or suburbs. When I saw them on the hilltops the settlements looked like a cross between upscale real estate developments and medieval stone fortresses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Outside Bethlehem in Beit Sahour, I stayed with the family of a Palestinian tour guide, Samer Kokaly.  From the home’s marble balcony I could look across a valley to the Har Homa Settlement on the hill opposite.  My host said the mountaintops are shaved off before settlement houses are built.  His own house, he said, had been shelled from the direction of Har Homa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I didn’t expect my maps to flesh out geography with such personal stories or to label what tour guides both left and right differentiated as economic or  ideological settlements. But the same kind of infographic  tools I usually trust to find my way around made a strange fiction of West Bank realities.

In 1969 the artist Alighiero Boetti made a work, Occupied Territories, from a tracing of the Sinai, Gaza, and the West Bank severed from their newspaper context, abstracting cultural places into empty natural forms.  In contrast, my contemporary maps were filled with data, but they often erased power’s traces in the landscape. If a place is not on the map, does it really exist? Where does information end and art begin?  Whose reality does any map represent?

Previously:  City, Sea and Shared Spaces

Next: “The world’s longest gallery”

In a series of guest posts, writer and Walker tour guide Christine McVay shares her experiences traveling to Tel Aviv for the SupraSpace conference on June 3 and 4, 2012. Read part one.

When I arrived, jet-lagged, in Tel Aviv, people advised me to take to the beach, which I did. It’s long, Mediterranean, and festive: couples thwack balls back and forth in the shallows, kids build castles and moats, there’s a promenade patterned in Copacabana-like swirls, and beachside shops offer fruit smoothies and sunglasses.

On the beach, Tel Aviv. Image courtesy of John W. Stephenson

Farther south in the old Arab port of Jaffa the seaside road followed the line of a Crusader seawall. An Ottoman-era clock tower marked a square, outdoor cafes encroached on the sidewalks, and tourists snapped away at fantastical graffiti.

Jaffa

Between this gentrifying Jaffa port and the Tel Aviv beaches, I walked through an area where neither center seemed to set the style. A grassy park and a rocky area interrupted the sandy beach. One or two people were reading on the rocks and Muslim families barbecued in the park. Across the street the Hotel David Intercontinental towered over a mosque. On the beach side stood a memorial/museum, a glass box inserted into a stone ruin. And at the edge of the rocks, an abandoned hulk of modern concrete, burned out and layered with tags and other graffiti, overlooked the sea.

My Lonely Planet explained that this transitional zone had been an Arab neighborhood before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The glass and stone Etzel museum commemorated a pre-state military group and the battles it fought. The blackened concrete building–once an aquarium, then a disco–was the site of a suicide bombing in 2001. The mosque had survived both the war and a riot that followed the bombing.

Obviously, much history lay beneath the quiet surface of that sunny space. I wondered about the different people using the Manshiye neighborhood peaceably now, what it meant to them, what they’d want to build or how they’d re-inscribe it if they could.

Later I remembered an Israeli artist, Yael Bartana, who imagined a different marking of place in this vicinity.  Her video, A Declaration, (which appeared in the Walker’s 2007 Brave New Worlds exhibition), showed a young man heroically rowing out to a little rock offshore. When he arrives he replaces the Israeli flag flying over this tiny territory with an olive tree. After my walk through the area’s unsettled mix of elements, his gesture still seemed to me absurd and brave at once.

The convivial SupraSpace conference spanned centuries of mostly western art, from Roman imperialist narrative and Byzantine sacred spaces to Chelsea rooftops, Flux-Tours and the overlapping soundscapes that simultaneously occupy the same space in the Old City of Jerusalem. There were cognitive maps of Treblinka, rendered in ghostly pencil lines. An Israeli geographer talked about landscapes–the naive and the critical–painted on the Israeli side of the Separation Barrier in the West Bank.

The conference ended with a talk by Israeli artist Larry Abramson, who’d struggled with using the image of an abandoned Palestinian village that had been effectively erased in Israeli historical memory and artistic representation.  Abramson described a dilemma of showing what was really there without “taking advantage” or condescending to the absent Palestinians.

There were no Palestinian scholars at the conference to present villages, walls, rooftops or imperialist narrative from their point of view, although an Israeli-Palestinian film on water that I missed was screening elsewhere in the city.  The next day, I left for the West Bank.

Previously:  Paper, Place, Conflict

Next:  Magic Maps

SupraSpace: On the Concept of Space and Place in Art and Visual Culture.
Image courtesy of John W. Stephenson

Maybe because I’m a wanderer at heart and perpetual outsider, places fascinate me–what they look like, what’s gone into their making, how people live there–and I’m drawn to art and photography that visualizes places. When an academic conference came up this year about space and place in art and visual culture, I looked forward to presenting a paper I’ve been working on, and to bringing to the conference a Walker tour guide’s concern with viewer experience.

My subject was an Indian artist who also focuses on personal experience. Atul Bhalla’s multidisciplinary works make visible  an ordinarily ignored stretch of the river that flows past Delhi, foregrounding people’s relationships with water and the natural bodies it’s placed in.

The SupraSpace conference took place June 3-4, 2012, at the University of Tel Aviv in Israel; after it finished, I planned to tour the West Bank, seeing for myself, I hoped, what these contentious places look like, how they’re experienced by the people who live there, and how they’re represented in visual culture and art.

When I discovered, belatedly, that a cultural and academic boycott of Israel is on and gathering steam, the trip became problematic for me. Whether I attended or not, I’d be making a political statement about a conflict I know shockingly little about. In the end, I took inspiration from a collaboration my son mentioned,  between Edward Said, the late postcolonial critic and advocate for the Palestinian cause and Israeli-Argentinian conductor Daniel Barenboim. Together and improbably they had founded an orchestra for Israeli and Arabic music students.

I took both journeys, speaking in Israel about place consciousness, subjective experience, and an artist who models a relationship with a substance common to everyone. And then I traveled to the West Bank, trying to look as responsibly as an interested but inexpert outsider can–and trying to make my camera work.  It’s taken me a while to put this series of blog posts together; they’re more like personal essays than the raw data of experience. Nor have I followed the threads of history back to the labyrinth where conflict began. These posts try to tell of what I saw in places I don’t belong to, but passed through as a fellow traveler on the planet.

Next:  City, Sea and Shared Spaces.