Installation

Installation, mixed media (fans, electronics, aluminum, wood and digital prints) 92 x 148 x 35 cm (central surface) 26.1 x 20.9 cm (each print) MUSAC Collection

Mawat takes its name from a law enacted by the Ottoman Empire on the occasion of an agrarian colonisation programme in the last quarter of the 19th century (Weizman, 2015, p.39). It is the name given to those barren lands likely to be expropriated by the government. To demarcate them, the rule established a sound-based criterion: an area was mawat if it was not in production and the sounds and voices of the nearest villages were no longer audible. Mawat – literally meaning “dead” – thus became the administrative feature of voiceless land. In the installation, a grid of fans circulates the air in the exhibition space.

Mawat takes its name from a law enacted by the Ottoman Empire on the occasion of an agrarian colonisation programme in the last quarter of the 19th century (Weizman, 2015, p.39). It is the name given to those barren lands likely to be expropriated by the government. To demarcate them, the rule established a sound-based criterion: an area was mawat if it was not in production and the sounds and voices of the nearest villages were no longer audible. Mawat – literally meaning “dead” – thus became the administrative feature of voiceless land. In the installation, a grid of fans circulates the air in the exhibition space. Periodically, the movement stops and the surface begins to function as a resonant structure. Ancient songs linked to agricultural practices fill the space during these moments. As in the Ottoman case, the transformation of the landscape carried out by the National Colonisation Institute was also based on the identification and renewal of unproductive land. Significantly, many of the settler towns created during this programme were built without a cemetery. In Mawat, this remarkable detail is addressed in a sequence of images around the centrepiece. Absence, movement and reappearance characterise the spectral space of the installation. Instead of the strong visual nature of the colonising programme, the air comes to the foreground, and with it, the blurred space where wind and voice coincide, undifferentiated and in continuous flux.