Back to Earth
Site-specific installation
Stone, steel dividers, collected natural and man-made materials
The 6th "Festival of Festivals" exhibition, Wadi Nisnas, Haifa, Israel, 1999
The site, which was made up of two rather unrelated and neglected strips of land and situated by a busy traffic junction in central Haifa, suggested a horizontal, two-dimensional treatment on the ground level. The aim was to create a design, which links together the two sites through the suggestion of movement and to add richness of color and texture to an otherwise somewhat bleak and monotonous urban environment.
Using stones from a heap of rubble on the site and corrugated steel sheets the ground was divided into an organic pattern of fields of various sizes. These fields were then filled with a variety of waste materials, both natural and man-made. The materials, which include branches, pine-cones and pine-needles, bark of Eucalyptus trees, palm leaves, gravel, thorns, rusty sheets of metal and empty beer bottles, were collected with the help of classes of school children in the hills and forests surrounding the town.
These humble material, brought together in a new and surprising context, began to reveal the simple beauty of their colors and textures.
