Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres

2014, In collaboration with Omer Krieger. Dual-screen HD video, Stereo Sound, 9min.

Rehearsing the Spectacle of Spectres are the opening words of a poem written by Anadad Eldan (b. 1924), a member of Kibbutz Be’eri, a collective community in the south of Israel, founded in 1946 near the Gaza strip. Eldan, the Kibbutz Poet, wrote librettos for kibbutz ceremonies, holiday performances and agricultural pageants, and also published numerous books of his own lyrical poetry. Eldan’s poetry is chatacterized by an intricate and aliterative style, phonetically musical, based on a rich and ancient hebrew. As the writer of collective language and Bible teacher for generations of kibbutz members, Eldan is widely admired but also considered as a controversial and peculiar artist.
The video was shot entirely in Be’eri, as Evron and Krieger invited a group of kibbutz members to recite the 26 verses of this opaque and suggestive poem. These sequences are combined with aerial and outdoor shots showing sites of assembly, stages of collective expression, public sculpture and architecture.
The work surfs the wave of the kibbutz phenomenon as a 20th century avant-garde, a radical social experiment situated today on the border of Israel and the Hamas-governed Gaza strip, one of the most charged geopolitical environments in the world.
Evron and Krieger seek to create a new image of the kibbutz, which stems from the architecture of communal life and the performativity of togetherness. The artists salute the poetic action taken as part of the project of society and state design.

This is the first joint work of Nir Evron and Omer Krieger, which combines cinematic and performative sensibilities, proposing political and aesthetic questions situated in public space and human body.