This project was called “Extraterritorial Appropriation.” Harris-Brandts started by looking at places where physical access is prohibited, like closed military zones, which are often slated for future settlements. She was trying to find a way to ‘activate’ these areas, while thinking about the intersections between Palestinian landscape, political agency and economy. Harris-Brandts focused on apiaries, bee keeping, which has a long history in the West Bank but has greatly declined since the occupation. One factor in this decline is the strict cultivation restrictions on Palestinian lands, which limit the type and style of cultivation. If land is not cultivated “properly,” it can be confiscated by the Israeli state, a practice that has had an extremely negative impact bee keeping practices. But in open swaths of military zones there are no cultivation restrictions. Planting wildflowers in these closed zones to revitalize apiaries would give the spaces “a new form of activation,” one that is Palestinian-oriented, and the bees would act as agents of “re-appropriation” in spaces that can’t be physically accessed. The flowers that would bloom in these areas? Israeli protected wild flowers. “So if I draw back to the idea of the absurdity of the strong restrictions of the occupation” Harris-Brandts explains, “we start to think, what would be the logical response?” The interviewer added, “Have checkpoints for the bees?” Harris-Brandts continued, “Yeah, and so, always looking at how you can take a sincere situation and use it to elucidate complexities and underlying absurdities.” While Harris-Brandts does not explain her conceived method of seeding the wildflowers, there was a picture showing a person slinging a capsule of seeds over a fence. This image seemed to show an idea of how the process could be started. Harris-Brandts also spoke of other projects that dealt with waste management issues and the reactivation of house demolition sites (which can’t be rebuilt upon), and the small areas of ‘state land’ that are dabble between private Palestinian lands. DAAR is a collective and residency program for artists and architects, based in Beit Sahour, Palestine. Their work “combines discourse, spatial intervention, education, collective learning, public meetings and legal challenges … [and] proposes the subversion, reuse, profanation and recycling of the existing infrastructure of a colonial occupation,” according to the DAAR website. More of Harris-Brandts’ work can be found here.
Posted on: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 02:23:14 +0000
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