FALLEN LEAVES

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This post is an extract from a report I did in 2014 of a visit to the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

One of the exhibits I reported on was entitled Fallen Leaves in a Void and it made a very bit impression on me.

When I came home, I found it was too emotional an item to write up straight away, but when I did get round to it, crying my way through writing it, I realised that including the item next door to it, on the olive tree, would add a whole new level of meaning, and clicking on the link in my text on that item would break your heart.

Little did I realise that the events of the October HAMAS attack and the subsequent collective punishment/genocide would endow my report with an even deeper meaning. Its relevance over the last decade reminds us that this whole business started with the 1948 NAKBA the completion of which looks to be at hand.

This is a truly creative and provocative piece. Some 10,000 faces punched out of steel are scattered on the ground. The work is dedicated not only to Jews killed in the holocaust, but to all victims of violence and war.

You are invited to walk over the faces and listen to the sounds they make as they shift beneath your feet.

This is what you see in front of you as you try to keep your balance.

And this is what you nearly fall on top of.

It is hard to convey the emotional impact of this place. The noises made by the shifting faces remind you both of screams, varying in pitch and volume depending on the sizes and shapes of the faces making them, and of something like a clanking tank running over fleeing victims. It is quite unnerving.

Then, in the middle distance, a shaft of light which turns the faces to gold. What does it mean? Hope amid despair? Gold from the teeth of the dead? Just plain Shekels? Even more unnerving

And then there is the olive tree. Presented here as a symbol of fertility and peace. Visitors can write a wish or prayer for placing on the tree.

Unfortunately, the olive tree for me has become a symbol of the wanton destruction of the livelihood of Palestinians on the West Bank by illegal settlers. So this item brought me up a bit short.

And then a mental exercise suggested itself to me and I would like you to go back to the beginning of the Fallen Leaves and slowly go through the sequence again. Only this time, still being true to the artist's wider conception, imagine they are the faces of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Even more unnerving.