Tamkeen in Bethlehem - Faten Nastas

Most of the Tamkeen workshops were conducted in the Old City of Jerusalem. Although several were held at the premises of Al-Ma’mal itself, partner institutions also hosted the workshops. Jumana Abboud taught at the Burj Al Laqlaq Centre, Raeda Saadeh at the Old City Youth Association, St. Dimitri’s Orthodox School and St. Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Youth Club and Jawad Al-Malhi and Tina Sherwell taught at the Spafford Children’s Centre. However, Al-Ma’mal’s good relationship with institutions in Bethlehem meant that there were also workshops conducted there. One of these, an introduction to contemporary art, was facilitated by Faten Nastas at the International Centre of Bethlehem.

1.What were you doing in 2003 and how did you first get involved with Al-Ma'mal's Bethlehem workshop?
Since August 1998, I had been working as the Art Co-ordinator at the International Centre in Bethlehem (ICB). I was responsible for all the activities related to Contemporary Fine Art and to Craft as well. As part of my work, I helped in establishing the "The Cave" Arts & Crafts centre (in Arabic it is called al-Kahf), especially the "Cave Gallery", and the Cave workshop complex. Al-Kahf Centre belongs to the ICB.

The staff of al-Ma'mal, especially Jack Persekian & Jumana Abboud, had known me since I was a student at Bezalel Academy. I graduated from Bezalel in 1998 so kept a good relationship with them and they were aware of my work in Bethlehem.

2. Can you tell me about your approach to the workshop and how you got such varied results?
I had different and various ideas for the workshop. However, my main goal was to introduce the youth to the ‘wide world of the Contemporary Art’, and encourage them to explore new languages for expressing themselves and ideas. So, my approach was more theoretical and philosophical at the beginning. I showed them different works of famous contemporary artists, different techniques, concepts and topics. We had lots of discussions. Then, the second half of the course was practical: after discussing with the youth various ideas, and after choosing their topic and their desired language, I worked as a facilitator helping them or directing them to the know-how and the technicalities of making their work.

3. What were the main challenges during your workshop?
After such a long time, and after celebrating a very successful activity, it is difficult to remember the challenges. I think that my enthusiasm about it was much more than the challenges. However, I remember that in some discussions, it was difficult to reach a few of the young participants. I mean that they were not so open-minded, and heir way of thinking, as well as their work, was not able to embrace something more deep and profound.

Besides, I remember that in the last few sessions, it was hard for me to follow and help each participant individually. It took more time and effort than I expected. But, this is of course due to the technical variety. I remember that 2 students did video works, others did photography, others installation, and there was also sound installation. So, each participant had different demands and I was their only guide.

4. What are your strongest memories of this period?
My strongest memory is how we used to discuss "Art issues", also personal stories and critiques of society. The group of students were great and the majority were very open-minded and spoke about personal stories very openly. This encouraged everyone to take the course seriously and profoundly. It was also like a "soul healing workshop". I was also very happy to see how determined the participants were, they were very proud of themselves and they really worked hard to complete their work and to do the final installation. I will never forget how proud they were during the opening, when they shared the outcome with their families and friends.

5.Did the experience have any impact on your subsequent work?
The experience was enjoyable and I think it empowered me to work more with youth. The following year we had a very successful project at the ICB, where we worked with more than 150 students from different 10 local schools, using "Installation Art as an Advocacy tool for Youth Concerns". Also as part of my work at the ICB, I was a member of the team who worked on the establishment of the Dar al-Kalima College. Today, I am the chairperson of the Visual Arts Department, and I enjoy very much working more and more with Youth and adults. I am sure that this had also an impact on my individual work as an artist, but, I am not sure if I can define it now.

I also have become an observer of Art in Jerusalem and in Palestine. I give lectures about the "Art in Palestine" in our College and abroad. I have actually just come back from an international conference in Sweden where I gave 3 lectures about Contemporary Palestinian Art.

Interview - Jumana Abboud

All of the Tamkeen workshops were specifically directed at young people and were held in partnership with a number of schools, youth clubs and organisations in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. One of the first artists to be engaged for the Tamkeen workshops was Jumana Abboud who taught on site at the Burj Al Laqlaq centre in the Old City, as well as conducting numerous workshops at Al-Ma’mal itself. Her involvement with Al-Ma’mal was to become permanent. After the workshops were completed she remained at the foundation and is today the longest serving member of permanent staff.

1. How did you first get involved with Al-Ma’mal?

I came back to Jerusalem from Canada in 1991. I am originally from the Galilee but wanted to continue art studies at that time and the only possibility for me was to study at the Bezalel Institute in West Jerusalem so I applied for a scholarship. I didn't get it but I stayed and studied there anyway. In 1994 I was walking on Salahuddin Street and it was the afternoon of the opening of Jean Luc Vilmouth's exhibition. I’ll never forget how excited I was to see it. I felt so relieved. After four years of studying at Bezalel, where there was no contact with Palestinian art, here was a very contemporary exhibition related to Palestine happening right on Salahuddin Street. After that I was a regular visitor to Anadiel so that’s how I made the connection.


In 2002 Al-Ma'mal received the Tamkeen workshop grant and it was through this project that I became involved with Al-Ma'mal. Jack invited me and Raeda Sadeh to conduct different workshops at youth centres in the Old City. I taught contemporary art at the Burj al Laqlaq community centre to groups of children aged from 11 – 16. It was mostly painting and drawing. I kept a diary of the workshops and I gave it to Al-Ma'mal as a report of how the workshop was. Sections of it are used in ‘Workbook’ published in 2004 which is an account of Al-Ma’mal activities from 2000 onwards.

2. What were the main challenges in the workshops?

My challenge was to find a way of accessing the students’ imaginations. It was like they had lost the ability to imagine even though some of them were very young. The first thing they would draw would be Al-Aqsa Mosque or a Palestinian flag or a soldier: always something that related not only to reality but specifically to political reality. All their reference points were political and what they drew reflected all the symbols of the conflict and the political context. There were no visions of imagined things. I think this inability to imagine may also partly relate to the local school system as well which is very much focused on rote and passive rather than creative learning.

Also every time you have new group the ice breaking can be the most difficult part and it is also more difficult if they are older. Teenagers especially are resistant to opening up. From teaching workshops I went on to help organise them and one of the things we noticed with all instructors was that the initial workshops were always tough. There was a process through which we had to overcome their defensiveness before they broke down enough to let their imaginations through.

3. How did you deal with these challenges?

It became about practice and making that practice available to the participants. I tried not to be judgemental because then you risk pushing your own visions and not extracting theirs. However, in the end it worked. After a lot of practice I was getting wonderful results and beautiful paintings. I think the most successful were the animal drawings and the paintings influenced by Gustav Klimt. I used images as reference points. I thought of Klimt because he was so colourful so I took the approach of introducing the students to contemporary art through colour.

4. What are your strongest memories of the workshops?
The feedback - what they were all really happy about was the exhibition and the book [Workbook, 2004]. We gave them a group exhibition of their work as did Raeda and others. These always made them feel good. They would bring their family and their friends and they would be so proud. We try up to the present to show a balance of all the participants’ work and it encourages them and makes then want more.

5. How did the staff profile change after the Tamkeen project?

Khadijeh Kanambo had been full time since 1998 and maybe even a little before that. She left in November/December 2009 (hopefully on temporary leave only!). Raeda Sadeh worked in the gallery part-time with Jack before she came to Al-Ma’mal but both Raeda and I started part-time with the workshops in 2002. I then returned as a full-time member of staff in autumn 2003 and Raeda signed up as full time in 2004. She was assistant coordinator of projects but she left in the spring of 2009.

6. How has your work with Al-Ma’mal affected your own art practice/work?

It’s positive that I work in a place that respects me as an artist. It’s a place that encourages my creative development. It’s advantageous to work in an environment that has the same spirit as what I, as an artist, love to do: make art. And it’s a privilege also because at Al-Ma’mal, we focus on making other artist’s projects a success, so I learn to look at the creative process differently and through an administrator’s eye and this help me invent for myself and for my own work a sort of disciplinary formula.

The Tamkeen Workshops

As noted earlier, the generous Ford Foundation grant in 1998 enabled Al-Ma’mal to start up and had covered the first two years of its activities. Subsequent grants from Ford followed and the Foundation remains one of Al-Ma’mal’s strongest sponsors to this day.

Another longstanding relationship is with the Consulate General of France in Jerusalem, a supporter from the very early days when Anadiel and the French Cultural Centre were neighbours on Salahuddin. Such cooperation and practical support from foreign consulates and cultural centres in Jerusalem has been a consistent feature in the life of both Anadiel and Al-Ma’mal. In the early 2000s in particular, funding was mostly secured in the form of small development grants or from cultural cooperation budgets. These included grants from the Society for Austro-Arab Relations (SAAR), World Vision and the European Commission. Although these could not provide for the scope of activities that bodies such as Ford could enable, they covered almost all of the artist-in residence workshops and exhibitions between 2000 and 2002, and also contributed to essential running costs. A relationship established with the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) at this time also continued for several years. In 2002, however, an opportunity arose to submit a proposal for another major injection of workshop funding:

After Bethlehem 2000 I quit the arts sector for a while and got my next job at USAID. Eventually in 2002 I went to London to do my masters but during this time I wrote a funding proposal which Jack submitted to Tamkeen, a development programme working under the USAID umbrella. This had no direct connection to my job but it was useful because I understood through working there exactly what Tamkeen and USAID wanted from this project and it fitted exactly with what Al Ma'mal could do. (Samar Martha, 2010)

This made a new series of workshops both feasible and timely and meant that they could be properly planned incorporating all the experience from the workshops undertaken in the first four years. It also meant that specific artist-tutors could be employed on a longer term basis than residency artists and thus develop in-house expertise and an evolving teaching programme.

All Change - Jawad Al-Malhi and Tina Sherwell 2001 - 2002

When assessing the results of the first three years of workshops, it was evident that there needed to be a greater range of learning activities, more focus on group interaction and wider participation. As a consequence Al-Ma’mal decided to diversify and expand the workshops to encompass various forms of visual art. The possibilities included experimentation in drawing, painting, collage, clay, installation, and video as well as photography. Artists employed to design and deliver the workshops were encouraged to utilize whatever approach, medium and technique they thought would best serve the purpose, while also following Al-Ma’mal’s overall objectives.

As a consequence four new workshops were launched in 2001 with two new partners: the Spafford Children’s Centre and the Burj Al-Laqlaq centre. All four workshops were conducted by Palestinian Artist Jawad Al-Malhi and his wife, British artist, writer and educator Dr. Tina Sherwell.

Jawad al Malhi had begun painting in the late 80s and exhibited at Anadiel in 1994. He was close to the developments that took place in those early days and his comments about that time echo observations made by others:

In those days there were few Palestinian artists and those there were tended to be ‘state ‘artists whose work was entirely about the political cause. Politics was the reason not the art. So when Jack first talked about opening Anadiel I thought it was a crazy idea. However, when artists from outside like Mona [Hatoum], Samir [Srouji] and Nasser [Soumi] came it was fantastic. As an artist on the ground I felt that politics was not our job anymore. I was starting to focus on concepts and at that time, and with that kind of input, you felt free.

Al-Malhi and Sherwell took a completely different approach to the workshops based on the assumption that an artist has very different skills to a teacher thus the interaction with the children should be more organic than formally instructional.

Rather than ‘teaching’ as such, we saw it as artists working with children in order to get them to explore their own creativity - more explaining and facilitating than teaching.

The workshops took place over a longer period so that skills could be built up gradually which was also intended to create deeper bonds within the groups themselves:

As well as the art the point was to bring the different communities in Jerusalem into one place, so we were trying to create a social atmosphere and actually build up commonalities and cohesion among the youth in the communities. They built a very strong relationship between each other and they spent a lot of time together afterwards. The workshops always spilled over into social time.

The purpose was also psychological. Throughout the West Bank the following year, the workshops became the only outlet for children to process some of the damage done by the full scale military attacks of 2002. They were art and sculpture workshops and Al-Malhi was very clear about the purpose of them all:

To me it was to help them build a dream and in some cases to help them overcome specific psychological problems connected to the conflict. For example we did a travelling workshop which went to Jenin and Nablus and places affected by aerial attacks called ‘The Dream of Flying’ and this was to make them look up and give them confidence in the sky again. We made kites and set them flying one every minute. Taysir Bataniji did this is Gaza too.

Luc Chery 2000 – 2003

In 2000 I took my son to the photography school in Arles where I met Luc Chery who was to become my husband in 2002. He came to Palestine and did projects with Al-Quds University, Bethlehem University and Al-Ma’mal (Huda Imam, Jerusalem April 2010)

Chery was involved with Al-Ma’mal for several years and conducted two workshops as well as presenting his own photography and exhibition projects:

The first workshop I did (in July 2001) was called "Jerusalem Ma Ville" and was conducted with Al-Quds University students in cooperation with the French Consulate and Al-Ma'mal. The aim was to lead students to a renewed appreciation of their city beyond the usual evidence on the surface.

Unfortunately no images of this project are currently available but in a statement written at the time Luc Chery wrote:

This photographic work was accomplished between September 2000 and May 2001, a date which marked the beginning of a new era of uncertainty and conflict: the outbreak of Al-Aqsa Intifada. Although within the heart of a conflict, this collection does not show any picture of war or confrontation, however, the day to day life, attitudes and expressions unveil tension and darkness. The images of architecture we see tend to point to an unrelenting process of destruction/reconstruction or perhaps re-composition. So many buildings are themselves affected by questions of identity through patches, scars, emptiness and additions all strongly marking the uncertainty and fragility of any possible definition of the place (From exhibition statement, 2001).

Chery’s workshop at Bethlehem University in 2002 introduced young Palestinians to a wide variety of materials within the context of contemporary art, particularly the creative possibilities of working with recycled materials. This was consistent with Al-Ma’mal’s shift in focus for workshop content that had occurred in 2001 following an assessment of workshop results over the first few years.

Here, the aim was to introduce new relationships with scraps and material, alteration and destruction and then to rebuild autonomous artworks out of this process (Luc Chery, June 2010).

Objects and materials were collected from domestic and industrial waste according to their ‘expressive uniqueness’ and there were conceptual echoes of Chery’s previous workshop project:

Cracks and rips mark their status as objects that have been tossed about, split up and marginalized. Such scattered fragments can be staged in devices enabling interplay of shapes and allotting them a renewed credit. When rearranged, they become small autonomous worlds endowed with impermanence and flexibility. As they are assembled, the scraps and fragments interact in floating layers and suspensions, in crushed-down volumes, in shadows and transparencies where they find a new inscription, a new belonging (From workshop proposal, 2002).  

 

 

 

As Al-Ma’mal’s artist-in-residence in 2003 Chery presented a two-part exhibition called Les Habitats-Ode to the Refugee Camps. One series of photographs showed structures in Gaza’s refugee camps enclosed by cloth or plastic sheeting. A parallel series showed spaces in Bordeaux that had been specially constructed by Chery from discarded plastic, fabric and furniture. When the images were juxtaposed it was sometimes hard to differentiate between the two.

The project not only conveyed a sense of the confinement in the enclosed spaces of the refugee camps but also gave an empathetic picture of a people surviving by converting waste into a priceless commodity that provides shelter.
 

  

 

  

Luc Chery Website

Artist-in-Residence - Scarlett Hooft Graafland, 2000

The other artist-in residence for 2000 was Dutch artist Scarlett Hooft Graafland who had come to Jerusalem in 1999 for post graduate study at the Bezalel Academy. Together with British artist Emily Douglas, she had done a mobile performance piece in the Old City that Christmas in which the two artists sold soap they had designed in the shape of sheep or Jesus.

We organised a small cart where we placed a bowl of water so people could wash their hands and try out the soap. Because of the mobility of the cart, we could reach all the separate parts of the old city, from the Christian quarter to the Muslim, from the Armenian to the Jewish. It was interesting to have such a diverse audience and different responses to the work. (Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Interview, May 2010) 

It was through this she met Jack and they then discussed the possibility of having a similar installation of the work in Al Ma’mal and Anadiel. The title of the show was ‘Part-time Human’ and it also used soap carved into these same shapes. However, this time the work was used to explore questions in relation to the ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’, a temporary psychological disorder affecting some Jerusalem tourists who begin to believe that they themselves are Jesus.

For the installation at Al-Ma’mal, ‘Part-time Human’, I commissioned the production of hundreds of soap statues from one of the traditional Palestinian soap factories in Nablus. The soap is made out of soda and pure olive oil and is an ancient procedure. It is a famous Palestinian export product in the Arab world and is normally produced in square blocks. The sheep and Jesus statues were displayed on the floor of the gallery with many ‘Jesuses’ leading big flocks of sheep through the space. In this installation, I was trying to ask questions about the ‘real Jesus’, the same questions patients of the ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’ are dealing with (Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Interview, May 2010).

Designing, preparing and creating the components for this installation took a few months and required many trips to Nablus. This was a major undertaking in itself because the journey from Jerusalem passed though several check points necessitating several changes of mini bus. Getting back to Jerusalem with big boxes full of soap was an even greater challenge and not only because of the transport logistics:

When I first started the project, I had no idea it would be so complicated to make it happen. Many times I was stopped at check-points and had to show  my belongings and explain why I was travelling with these amounts of soap, and why I was a western woman travelling alone in the West Bank. There was always a general tension with the check-points and the Israeli settlements sitting on the tops of mountains in the West Bank with their rigid architecture that seems to have no connection to their surroundings. It made me realize how hard it must be for people who have to deal with this as a day-to-day reality (Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Interview, May 2010).

When the project was eventually realised, the entire floor of Gallery Anadiel was covered with the soap sculptures distributed in bundles throughout the gallery space. Visitors were compelled to walk around and in between the flocks of sheep led by the 'Jesuses', while immersed in the smell of the soap pervading the space. This gave the exhibition much more than a purely visual impact. Despite the challenges, the success of the project left Graafland with an overwhelmingly positive recollection of the experience: 

The hospitality of the Palestinians I met during my travels in the West Bank and the stunning landscapes of fields of old olive trees, the generosity of the factory owner in Nablus, where sometimes I would stay for days with his family working on the soap production, the interesting and broad art community I met through Al-Ma’mal - I thought it was very special and important to have a Foundation for Contemporary Art in the middle of Jerusalem with such a good program. I experienced a lot of creative energy at the centre and found that Al-Ma’mal was very well known and respected by the Israeli art community too (Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Interview, May 2010).

POSTSCRIPT

Graafland’s exhibition marked the second time that the floor of the gallery had been covered with Nablus soap, the first time being Mona Hatoum’s show at Anadiel in 1996. The soap and the factories had also been beautifully captured in a series of photographs by Issa Freij which were published in Edition 10 of What’s Up? in 1999.

These same images were reproduced in a special Al-Ma’mal Calendar in 2004 to stand as both testament and memorial to the soap and to the factories, several of which were destroyed by the Israeli incursion into Nablus in 2002.

For thousands of years the city of Nablus was exposed to many invasions yet no aggressor had dared to destroy the old city of Nablus and its precious cultural heritage until the coming of the Israelis. It was reported on the 12th of April 2002 that among many other buildings in the old city of Nablus, the Masri, Rantisi and Cana’an soap factories had been destroyed. (Jack Persekian, From 'Nablus Soap', 2010) 

 

Artist-in-Residence Interview – Peter Riedlinger 2000

1. How did you first get involved with Al-Ma'mal?
I was initially invited to Jerusalem by the Jerusalem Center for the Visual Arts, an Israeli institution based in the city. I had a desire to come to the country to understand more about the complex situation at that time in 1999 while the peace process was still actually in process. I stayed for 6 months as their guest on Mount Zion and developed my project us/them.

The curator of contemporary art in the Israel Museum recommended that I go to Gallery Anadiel where she thought the work would fit well. I contacted Jack and we met and I introduced the work to him. He then invited me to show the work at his gallery. The show was arranged and I extended my stay beyond so all in all I stayed 8 months and the team of Al-Ma'mal and me became friends. During my first trip I did a workshop with the Israeli High School for the Arts to finance my stay and the exhibition 'us/them' at Anadiel in April/May. The following summer Jack sent me an invitation to also run a photography workshop at Al-Ma'mal but at exactly that time the political situation escalated dramatically. When I returned to Jerusalem at the end of September 2000 the Intifada had just broken out and violence and oppression was all over the place.

2. What were the main challenges of your workshop at Al-Ma'mal?
The general situation of everyday violence and the very pessimistic mood that struck the people in East Jerusalem and the West Bank was certainly not favourable to hosting a workshop. The idea seemed so far away from the problems dictated by the time to everybody who was a resident of the city. However, despite these odds we managed to engage a group of youth who were quite curious and interested in my program and in the end two workshops were conducted. They resulted in some amazing images being made by the students which were then exhibited. Two things were important for me: understanding the critical role/power and coverage of the media and photography in the country on the one hand, and understanding the medium of photography from its very base on the other. This made the students quite creative.

3. What are your strongest memories of your time there?
I have plenty of very strong memories that are also personal. I met and fell in love with my wife the Palestinian artist Noel Jabbour. We harvested olives from a neglected old grove in Ein Kerem and made about 25 litres of the finest olive oil in Beit Jala. At night we heard the bombardment of Beit Jala by the Israelis while during the day we went there to press the olives. In a way it was quite absurd but I wanted to continue doing things that were normal. Also I remember going to the cinema in Ramallah at night and how the Israeli soldiers on checkpoints could not believe that there were people who were insisting on doing such activities among Palestinians.

4. Did the experience have an impact on your own work?

Certainly it had a direct impact. We moved away from Ein Kerem to the east to Dahiat al-Barid close to Jack's house. At one point the Israelis started to isolate first the neighborhood then the whole city from the West Bank. This was the start of a new project 'us/them II' that documented these drastic changes in the urban landscape in and around the city. The escalated building in and of settlements and infrastructure became particularly relevant in my work. The project was then followed up in 2008 and exhibited at Gallery Anadiel as well as in the Goethe Institute in Ramallah, Beirut and Damascus and it was published in Camera Austria.

5. Do you have any other observations about your time at Al-Ma'mal? 

I have always the greatest respect for all their strength to keep up such significant and important cultural work for East Jerusalem and its residents, despite the crippling isolation the Palestinians suffer.

Peter Riedlinger Website

Email Interview May 2010

Peter Riedlinger, continued his relationship with Al-Ma’mal after his official residency period and conducted a second photography workshop in 2001.

Bethlehem and Jerusalem 2000

In 2000 the activities in Al-Ma’mal had to be dramatically scaled back. There were no workshops, only two artists in residence and only two other exhibitions.

In the wider political context the millennium year confirmed a bitter end rather than a new beginning. Although optimism about an agreement between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak at Camp David in July was never particularly high, the absolute failure and its aftermath could not have been anticipated. The political cynicism of Ariel Sharon's visit to Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in September, provided the spark that then ignited the second uprising, or 'Al Aqsa intifada’. In the years of violence and chaos that followed, not only did the mechanism for dialogue vanish but also any residual notion that agreement in the foreseeable future was possible.

The impact of this was certainly felt at Al Ma’mal but there were other more prosaic reasons for the scaling back. One of these was quite simply a lack of money:

That year was just awful with the situation and we had a funding crisis. There was no money for production either of What’s Up or workshops. Because a lot of our own money had gone into it, we were having personal financial issues too. This meant we all really needed to get proper jobs for a while. (Samar Martha, 2010)

At that time Huda Iman was working as a consultant to the Bethlehem 2000 project and thought that the whole team and infrastructure of Al-Ma'mal could work together on this project too. Thanks to Samar Martha’s sister, Khalil Rabah was able to get in and out of Ramallah so it was plausible:

It was tricky getting in and out of Jerusalem both for me and Khalil because we had West Bank IDs. Luckily my sister had a spare car with Jerusalem plates so we used to borrow her car and license to make it look like we were Jerusalem residents. We just had to hope that we didn’t get stopped and asked for our IDs. (Samar Martha, 2010)

However, things didn’t work out quite as expected. Although Jack, Huda, Khalil and Samar did all work with Bethlehem 2000, it was as individuals rather than a team.

We all ended up at the Bethlehem 2000 project. I remember Huda wanted to sub-contract Al-Ma’mal as an organisation to produce projects for Bethlehem 2000 but instead we all got jobs there separately. (Samar Martha, 2010)

Artist-in-Residence Interview – Beat Streuli 1999

1. How did you first get involved with Al-Ma'mal?

I was at the Sydney Biennale in 1998 and met an artist and friend Khalil Rabah. He transmitted an invitation from Jack for me to come and do something in Jerusalem. At the same time there was an Israeli artist who also transmitted an invitation from the Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv. I was really happy about these simultaneous invitations and thought it would save me two trips so I scheduled to do both at the same time.

Working on both sides was of course a bit more complicated than anticipated but it meant that I got to see the whole complex situation very quickly. It was just before the 2nd intifada so it was a comparatively pleasant time when I was there. A beautiful time in fact. I was there for two weeks working for about a week on each exhibition.

2. What kind of work you were doing?

In Tel Aviv I was snapping on the street but in Jerusalem I was doing portraits with high school students. I was meeting them and getting to know them a bit while taking their photos. Some of them were also part of the workshop I did.  It all went very smoothly. They were open minded kids who gave some hope for the future and were very different from the images of violence associated with this place. Two girls also took us around and we went to more traditional boy’s schools and I took portraits of some of these boys too.

3. What do you remember about the workshop?

The photography I did was part of the artist-in-residence program but it was also mostly for an exhibition at Anadiel Gallery. I remember doing a presentation about my work and looked at students’ work but I don’t think I really did a proper workshop. I mostly worked with Rula Halawani who organised it all.

3. What are your strongest memories of your time there?

The whole trip was pretty mind-blowing. It was my first time in the region and even though it was quiet at that time I knew of course about the political history and situation. The main thing was just to be there because when you are on-site you understand much better what is really happening. It’s all much closer and it touches you much more. In general, it’s true that you can know as much as you like about a place but unless you have spent some time there physically, it is nowhere near as present and meaningful. You need to have been there.

It was amazing to meet and get to know all of these people in such a short time through working closely with them and not just as a ‘cultural tourist’. Jack has a great personality and at that time Khalil was always there too. We went to Ramallah and once went all over the West Bank and often just hung out in outdoor cafes and talked. This is an easily forgotten reality. I think it is important to try and emphasise people not as victims but as human beings who have fun and are fun to be with despite all the problems in the background.

4. Did the experience change your own work or was it more a continuation and development of a theme?

What was important was Jack’s approach. I remember him saying that he tried to run the Al-Ma’mal art space in a ‘non-political’ way. He wanted a chance to deal with culture in a pretty pure way for once and not just as a reaction to the situation. So I tried not to react to the political issues too directly. This suited my work becuase it doesn’t usually do this anyway.

It was the first time that I had not focused on people with a social and western background like me. Having been a photographer never specifically looking for the ‘other’, quite the opposite, this gave me an opportunity to see how I could deal with such a new situation. This first experience of a different environment opened my work up to cope with more far away realities. It was an important first step. I was a bit nervous about photographing in a mostly Arab context because I was afraid of photography that seems ‘exotic’ but around the old city there was quite a cosmopolitan atmosphere that was typically Arab at the same time, and I think that my photographic method proved to work quite well in that context too.

The people I met doing the portraits were quite ideal. They were subjects that allowed me to project an image to my audience back home and elsewhere that was of normality and not a cliché of poor Arab countries or violence, and not naive or superficial either. What is nice about the work I did in Jerusalem is that these images went on. I have used them a few times either on their own, or mixed with other portraits from elsewhere. For example one or two were printed out 5m high and used for a spectacular window installation at Palais de Tokyo in Paris which was there for four years, from 2002.

5. How were the photographs exhibited at Al-Ma'mal?

In Jerusalem the portraits were produced as posters and mounted on the wall of the exhibition space. This was a perfectly adequate way of working with a low budget project but most of all it was a way of keeping it simple, accessible and everyday rather than what is created by using big and expensive framed prints.

Telephone Interview conducted April 30th 2010

Beat Streuli - Website