Endurance

2014, Digital file printed on 16mm b/w film Silent. 13min 40sec.

Endurance explores Rawabi, a Palestinian city under construction in the West Bank, north of Ramallah and 9 kilometers from Jerusalem. Despite its location in a conflict zone, the city was optimistically envisioned as a peaceful community of approximately 40,000 residents. Construction of Rawabi began in 2010, but has faced multiple challenges that threaten its completion.

The geometric shapes featured in the piece at first suggest modernist abstraction, however the film is a mapping of the interior of one of Rawabi’s model apartments. Each shot is an elevation of a single apartment wall, with doors, windows, and furniture represented as gray and black rectangles. The artist first drew the floorplans digitally, and then transferred the results to film, translating physical space to cinematic time using the formula of 1 meter = 5.4 seconds (shooting 16mm film at 24 frames per second). Consequently, the duration of each image is proportional to the size of the wall it represents. Exhibited using a film projector, the resulting pulsating sound and light are part of the viewing experience. Evron explains that his decision to translate from digital media to film, “does not stem from a nostalgic sentiment or fascination with the unique descriptive qualities of celluloid, but rather from the belief that only the cinematic apparatus can embody such an interesting relation of space and time.”  (LR)

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