An Archeology of Fear and Desire | 2009 - 2012

An Archeology of Fear and Desire is an attempt to examine Israel as place and metaphor and to look anew at a territory where “the maps of the sacred overlap, compete and ultimately exclude each other.”

An Archeology of Fear and Desire is an x-ray of an ongoing experiment in survival, where people appear to be disconnected from their traumas yet are possessed by a history they prefer to ignore.  It obliges them to be replayed by those very roles, trapped and incapable of freeing themselves, ready to kill and die rather than break this fatal cycle dominated by fear, denial and violence. 

An Archeology of Fear and Desire is an essay about the cauldron of fear and shadow within each person, unrecognized, unredeemed, denied, dissimulated and silenced, where the other is instrumentalized and thereby sacrificed.

It is an essay about wounded feelings and how constructs – social and religious – perpetuate the tyranny of roles, from servility to domination.

It is an essay about longing, belonging, exclusion and redemption. It is an essay about the fiction of identity and the terror of not having an identity. Will people dare to reclaim the root of their sadness?

Ideologies and religions are a betrayal of the humane in the human.  They give us the illusion of belonging while they make us strangers to what is most intimate within us.  They force us to take on roles that seem to protect our wounds, but in fact make us hostages to a simulacrum that lives off those buried hurts and the violence they inflict.

Will we dare to acknowledge and face what is wounded in us – fear, shame, sadness – the scar we thought had healed and yet still bleeds, the scar that the conflict in this place tears open again and again?

Will we have the courage to question the narratives and the devouring myths that are the anchor of our civilization? Will we have the courage to be unfaithful to the cultures that have nourished us, to break our own idols? Will we dare to open our hearts…unconditionally? 

Wrestling and embracing.