The experience of living temporarily in a new town has been a recurrent experience for me during the past years, due to my participation in artistic residencies abroad[1]. These situations always bring about the perception of a strong element in my production as an artist: the awareness of playing the role of a tourist-artist, in which my impressions of the town incorporates the ingenuity of someone who does not know it.

I was invited to a residency in Birzeit, West Bank, in September of 2009. This invitation once again brought into force the perception of my previous experiences as a foreigner in an unknown place. However, this journey had very significant and marked characteristics, which differed it from the “softer”, nearly even romantic, profile of other journeys and residencies. The delicate political and social situation of Palestine, along with restrictions on my entrance visa and on traveling within the country, generated a situation of alert, an expectation in relation to the trip that reflected also on the comments of people to the news: “but isn’t it dangerous?, don’t you have anywhere else to go?, why on earth Palestine?”

Facing this situation – the possible risks and a certain degree of uncertainty as to the ability or not of getting into Palestine territory, to be able or not of coming back from there, the vulnerability to situations out of my control – the mere fact of being in Palestine, of living there for a while, of being able to come back became for me a performance. Considering this, I decided to keep an open diary. I invited a group of people to track my trajectory and to follow my perceptions, opening up the possibility of establishing an open report to people with a similar background and of maintaining a communications channel with a group who would be neutral in relation to my experiences. It was also a strategy of security, of tracking me, as if I was being monitored from a distance.

I arrive in Palestine inevitably occupying the place of a tourist-artist – by the geographic displacement, by the lack of knowledge of the place, by differences of language and culture – and I propose myself to approach the region from this perspective. Thus, I allow my point of view and my perception to be constructed with the elements, images and situations that have the most immediate and the strongest impact on me.

The intensity of my experience made inevitable the desire to carry out other projects, besides the diary and performance originally thought of. And, as you might expect, those initial impressions were a decisive influence on the work that I would plan and carry out during the residency.

After a while, I noticed that my attention was drawn by the complex relation that had been established between two cultures, two people in permanent conflict – even though I was clearly living in only one of the sides of the story.  On this side, it was as if life was always suspended, in transition. Each day was lived intensely, as if the next day could never be foreseen or planned with much certainty.  At the same time, and perhaps as a consequence of this, I noticed a feeling of great detachment and tolerance to adverse situations.

All these aspects would be reflected on the relations established among participants of the residency and, after all, on the works produced. The experience of daily living in Palestine turned out to be an important element in the residency and my perception is that the work produced by the residents also touched on these issues. The intensity of the experience generated strong works and much involvement with the local situation.

As time went by, I realized that I was gradually moving from being a tourist-artist to being a political-artist. The research made during my residency ended up being strongly associated with my perceptions on the environment around me and on some central aspects of the daily life of the Palestinians. In my notebook there would appear points of interest and possibilities of research, like a wish list, always with some political or social connotation. There was a willingness to change the map of the region, to create Palestine passports, to rethink the role of the wall and of the checkpoints[2], to generate new forms of water distribution, to replace the M-16 fusils of the Israeli army by bubble guns, to collect a new series of resolutions – as the UN Resolutions – proposed by Palestine citizens. Me, “the last of the romantics.”

From this political-artist perspective, two works were finally produced, dealing with two crucial issues in the region: first, the presence of the wall and of the checkpoints and the limitations on the freedom of movement in the territory; second, the restrictions on the water supply to Palestine, which was reflected in the presence of a great number of large water tanks on the roofs.

The first of these works – a video entitled Vanishing Point (Ponto de Fuga) – captures the flow of vehicles and pedestrians at the Qalandia checkpoint near Ramallah. The video, which was filmed from the roof of a nearby building, in a fixed quadrant, portraits the movement in Qalandia for a whole day. The title is a word play since Vanishing Point also means “disappearing point”, and the work aims to reflect  on the disapearance of culture, loss of identity and restrictions on freedom.

The water tanks – massively present on the roofs of Palestine and so visually impacting on the landscape – are the central element in Water Skyline, an installation composed of a series of black and white photographs. Glued directly on the walls, as an imaginary horizon line, the photographs create a new landscape, emphasizing the water issues in this region.

I keep my wish list and I feel impregnated with the luminosity, the dust and the sound of the mosques in Palestine. It was an important and intense experience to be there, which greatly influenced the works produced during the residency. At last, my production reflected the intensity of the relations, the involvement with the local situation and the wish for change.

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[1] My first experience in this way was in Berlin, in 2006, when I presented an urban intervention called Estrangeiro and it happened again in residencies in Shatana, Jordania (2007) and in Cordoba, Argentina (2008).

[2] Checkpoints are control points present in the Palestine territory and controlled by the Israeli army, whose function is to control and restrict the circulation of Palestinians in their own territory, as well as their entry to and exit from Israel.