A Gift to Birobidzhan, 2009
"Die Vant," in Yiddish the Wall, is a footnote from and part of a series of videos entitled What Everybody Knows. In the spring of 2006, Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri, traveled together to Palestine and Israel, searching, researching and witnessing the situation in the country. They created a series of videos, that document their encounters with people struggling, resisting, surviving, suffering and living their everyday lives. Some of those include a geographer, a professor, an activists, a former detainee, an Architect, a Bedouin. The structure of the videos follows their 16-day journey, which included one or more situations or stories at a new location every day: Jerusalem, Naqab, Hebron, Lod, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, and more...
What Everybody Knows, is a play on what everybody ignores possibly. It is an attempt to really think about the questions of Palestine and reformulate them through experiences and accounts drawn from these trips.
Together all 16 of these situations / stories create a snapshot of what may provoke thought and discussion about the social, psychological, and political dimensions of contemporary life in occupied Palestine.
Ayreen Anastas is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. [more]
Rene Gabri is an artist living and working in New York. [more]