Shiran Yitzhari: Wall to Wall
Naama Haneman
The establishment of the State of Israel brought a fundamental change to the city of Haifa. With the end of the war, the city's population balance changed, and Haifa was left without most of its Palestinian residents. The Municipality, headed by Abba Hushi, decided to launch a military operation to demolish the old city area. This was a defining moment in the city's history. Known as Operation Shikmona, it sought to align with the new situation change the rich, extensive history embodied in the city's memory. Unlike an urban space that is built gradually, layer upon layer, throughout periods and governments, and preserves the natural spatial movement, this act was the opening shot for a conscious course of action, which the regime would repeat in other cities, forming a new narrative by means of the landscape.
It has been over a decade since the city of Haifa became Shiran Yitzhari's home, and it seems that from the very outset she found her hometown without being born there. The city, to which she arrived for her studies, soon became the object of her passion and work. From her first days in Haifa until the present, she has wandered the downtown streets; documenting the history, the archeology, and the changing traffic. The numerous photographs, however, do not contain landscapes, and it would be difficult to identify where they were taken. Yitzhari's eyes are drawn to the details. Through the act of photography, she zooms in and samples a detail from a broader picture: half a broken arch here, a flower hewn in the stone above. Through a peephole into a construction site, she photographs three steps leading to a blocked wall.
These story fragments, which Yitzhari collects from the walls and remains of abandoned buildings, could have contained a chain of belonging and identity, and led to the roots of a city, where traces of ancient populations still exist. But Yitzhari's images are free of people, who are also absent from the buildings, and with them, the stories get lost. Their dissociation from the place and the sequence of events seems to refine the symbols into basic forms, into a line, and it is unclear what the next line will be that will continue it. She transfers those inanimate, anonymous objects, which were abandoned without being granted the joy of conservation or urban memory, to a new page, where they seek belonging. In the studio, she unfolds the archive of images, placing them side by side, one image climbing over the other, as she reassembles them into a hypothetical structure, to form the big picture, as she sees it.
The cyanotype technique, which she employs repeatedly, links the camera, with which she documents reality, to printmaking, which allows her to create fictional and utopian worlds. Also known as "blueprint," this method was developed in the late 19th century, enabling the creation of multiple copies easily and inexpensively, using only white paper, emulsion, and sunlight. It was soon adopted by architects throughout the world, who used it to make architectural drawings for future buildings.
With never-ending curiosity, Yitzhari revisits the landscapes over and over again, in search of stories, belonging, and home. Landscape architect James Corner suggested that a landscape is neither innocent nor is it a mere aesthetic choice, but rather a great process created for the purpose of structuring a view and a way of thinking. Yitzhari realized long ago that even if we wanted to experience the landscape as a quiet, neutral space, as a product of nature, human beings, and time, we cannot ignore the fact that the landscape is a tool for creating an ideology by greater forces.
Yitzhari encounters these spaces daily. She walks alongside memories that external forces wanted her to forget, alongside history which asks to be rewritten. The pool of knowledge she sought to grasp repeatedly asks that she drop it. The vases which she often sculpts in the studio, as part of an age-old tradition of work with clay, the same vases that have been present throughout all historical strata and which hold residues and memories, will be the first to let go. Like archaeologists, who come across a vase without an inscription or a painting, and are forced to give it up without dating or ascribing it to a specific period, Yitzhari flattens the vases and strips them of their use. In the absence of continuity, in view of the erased past, their assigned role has been revoked, and they no longer function as a receptacle in which to gather information. Yitzhari transforms interior into exterior, exposing and deconstructing the knowledge they sought to preserve.
From there the way back to basics will be easy. For Yitzhari, the daughter of a building contractor, sandbags are a childhood landscape. The cheap sacks and sand embody a unique point in time, a promise of a better future, of what will one day be a home. But until they rise to become the basis of architectural splendor, they are nothing but inanimate objects, symbolizing a change that may arise; waiting for the right moment to declare their potential to spawn a new story. Yitzhari works with this temporal and spatial gap, just before it is molded and takes shape, and with the clear knowledge that history is not a fact. Unlike an archaeological site, where each new layer of sand is patiently and sensitively dated according to period, the unfiltered sand, which is usually stolen from the beach, is transported from place to place, without a history. Thus—without identity, without association with the past, and without yet being recharged with a future—Yitzhari layers and collects the sand in new sacks. She piles the sacks one atop the other to create a structure, a barrier. She acts in an attempt to figure out if the foundation is strong enough to support it. Will it provide her with an anchor and security when she most needs it.
But Yitzhari does not rely on the search for stability alone. A different perspective will reveal that alongside a nonexistent future, she also looks towards the erased past. She meticulously selects the core of the multiple images she has collected on abandoned ruins in the streets, fills them with colors that never existed, and delicately re-embroiders them on the sacks. Stones hewn by a mason, iron bent by a welder to create a railing—all these transform into flattened images, memories of manual labor, of an extinct craft, of people who also once saw their home as a fortress and discovered that it was no longer.
As far as Yitzhari is concerned, the ruin, in its temporary state, is here to stay. She cannot tell the exact story of the person who stayed in it, but she can say that he was here. Not only the presence of the house is crucial; the absence, too, must be present. She ties yesterday to tomorrow, clinging to the walls, knowing that it is vital to preserve and recount. At the same time, she mixes water with sand, casts and recreates the future to come.