A man scrambles up the wall of a derelict watchtower in the middle of a military camp wearing a wading waistcoat and carrying a tripod. He’s a ornithologist, and he goes to the abandoned Israeli military base of Oush Grab (Beit Sahour, Bethlehem region) to study birds migrating from Turkey to Egypt through Palestine. Since the military left the base, the birds have started using the base as a stopover point, temporarily inhabiting the structures left behind season after season. The military camp was established by the British during the Mandate on Palestine, after the First World War, and has since been used, in turn, by the Jordanians and the Israelis. The space had been congealed for decades into the shape of a walled up instrument of control, that had a crucial influence of the life of people who lived next to it, however off-limits it was for them. Today, the site is the theatre for a chess game between the settlers, who want to found a new town there, the army that supports them, the international activists and the NGO’s that try to stop them and the Beit Sahour municipality that tries to make it into a public park.
Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal were inspired by the work of the ornithologist and the spontaneous practice of the birds. The artists/architects founded a few years ago in Bethlehem an architectural collective aimed at investigating security/control devices and engaging with the spatial realities of the Israeli-Palestinian in a propositional manner. The collective came up with a proposal that doesn’t aim at re-articulating and thus doing reiterating the function of the site, but at profaning it. The goal of their proposal is to release the energies harnessed when establishing and maintaining the site of control, and at the same time encourage both the birds in their seasonal return and nature in its slow process of dismantling of the man-made structures. This threefold programme is behind the idea of piercing all the walls of the buildings to provide a myriad inlets for the birds and let the buildings happily crumble down – not to be “lost”, but to be “regained”.
Text © Gabriele Oropallo, 2009. Photos © Nina Kolowratnik, Alessandro Petti, 2009.