Working Title WM I+II, 2010
Two-channel video, 9:06 min
Water W Woman, Melon M Man. And behind every scene there always is another scene... The story goes that the only people who pick watermelons in Israel are men from an Arab-Israeli village called Manda, near Nazareth. They say it is because they are that much stronger... They go on to tell that they have been the ones picking watermelons in Israel and Palestine for thousands of years. The only way to look at landscape without political history / barriers / and also without romanticism is looking down at the earth / the sea / the street / the shore / one’s feet with the camera, facing down, present time, like looking at a map, or at a text.
Working Title WM I+II is a sequel to the monumental work DeadSee (2005), for which some 500 watermelons were composed, linked and juxtaposed in a completely different way — metaphoric, dead and sterile. In Working Title WM I+II the fruit is removed from its stem, lined up, and later in the same day, lifted again and collected by a team of workers and a tractor. In the diptych, I show several men throwing individually one hidden melon at a time, passing the heavy fruit to each other.
