SHE WAS CREATED FOR ME
Den Kozlov
Video by Vika Evdokimenko
Untitled from Vika Evdokimenko on Vimeo.
Wednesday 8 April 2009
Thursday 26 March 2009
Wednesday 25 March 2009
Monday 16 March 2009
Tuesday 20 January 2009
Cuban Hustlers
Trailer for a documentary on the traditions of hustling in Cuba and how the country's socialist values are being fast eroded from below - a new work in progress...
Cuban Hustlers Trailer from Vika Evdokimenko on Vimeo.
Cuban Hustlers Trailer from Vika Evdokimenko on Vimeo.
Opening to a mock-propaganda documentary on immigration I've been working on...
Of Pigeons & Russian Dolls - Intro from Vika Evdokimenko on Vimeo.
Of Pigeons & Russian Dolls - Intro from Vika Evdokimenko on Vimeo.
Friday 16 January 2009
Wadi al-Na’am
November 19th, 2008, Israel
I am lodged in a hostel in Jerusalem’s old city (a cave-like citadel with free Wifi) when I receive an important message in Morse code. Several mysterious phone-calls later I am at Yerushalaim’s central bus station. At the Tel Aviv departure point I meet the secret agent of an important undercover press organization. These are photographers who prowl around the country and the territories in search of conflict, protest, dissent, civil disobedience, violence - just my cup of tea. Tomorrow they are off on a new mission. An ‘environmentally sustainable’ mosque and community centre in a Bedouin village in the Negev - Israel’s southern desert, is up for demolition - the fate of so many public buildings and homes located in 45 of Israel’s unrecognized Bedouin Arab villages, that can be demolished quite legally by the Israeli authorities at any given time. In the case of the predicted demolition, we are told that activists and locals might put up a fight. After a short shluff at the headquarters, the photographers and I are on our way by sunrise.
The road takes us past the invisible coastline down a canvas of rolling clay hills. A turning towards Beer Sheva. We cross Highway 60, the main artery of the future Palestinian state, already fragmented between the PA controlled areas “A” and Israeli dominated zones “B” and “C”. The clay has now become a desert and the road cuts through it like a knife. The sun appears a yolk of orange and beyond the highway nascent pines are a scarce balding forest. In the distance the grey mirage of a ghost town and electrical lines leading us towards camel warning signs. The roadside is now littered with Bedouin shantytowns, meek goats, chewing camels, lined-up children. The stench of chemical waste hangs heavy in the air. Ramat Hovav, Israel’s National Site for Treatment of Hazardous Waste is these Bedouins’ next door neighbour. As a matter of fact, in 1979 this waste disposal facility was built in the spot where the Bedouin village of Wadi al-Na’am used to lie. The Bedouins were politely asked to budge up, which they did. Now they live next to what is effectively an unexploded nuclear bomb. This is what Ramat Hovav would become in case of an accident, endangering not only these citizens of the Negev, but the country as a whole as well as many of its Middle Eastern neighbours.
As we turn off the motorway and drive down a dirt road I hold my breath. There have been over 30 cases of cancer here over the past year. I feel like the Brothers Strugatzkys’ Stalker making his firsts incision into ‘the zone’, the landscape full of unknown traps and loopholes. I remember the Stalker’s lessons. This place only accepts those who have lost all hope. It is full of deadly snares, it is in constant flux and you cannot return the same way you came in. ‘The zone’ does not conform to any theoretical constructs. Here, you can only rely on your intuition. Shipwrecked on the rocks by the roadside, a small turquoise Fiat and its hapless owners stand back helplessly. Photographers from AP and Bleu I am told. Mahmoud, a Bedouin of a strikingly forceful complexion in military pants, grapples with the vehicle’s entrails. I am told Mahmoud is an exceptional man. Unusually for one of the locals he is educated, well travelled, probably the member of this community most integrated into Israeli society. He has built the mosque, now under threat, almost single-handedly. But on the day when the fruit of his labour is hanging by a hair’s breath, he has been called up for duty in the Israeli army reserves.
We ride on past. By the time we get to our destination I expect to see a full-on demonstration with police shields, rocks and rubber bullets. Instead we stop at the top of a hill, next to a terracotta-coloured carcass of a building. “Is this the mosque?”, I ask. Activists are huddled inside, still asleep, no action yet forthcoming. The photographers unleash their lenses and for a moment the objective of our mission blurs from political to artistic, all four of us fishing for the most comely image of this forlorn dystopia.
We meet Tess Lehrich, an activist from ‘Bustan’, an organization trying to promote fair allocation of resources here in the Negev, where like elsewhere, Jewish and Arab populations are locked in a struggle over land ownership. Together with Josh Berer, who was there to represent the Council of Unrecognized villages they emerge into the morning ready to do battle. Tess’s passion impresses, especially considering its only 7am. She tells me that Wadi Na’am, though it lies at a major junction of Israeli electrical supplies, is not connected to the national grid, nor to the telecommunications network or the water supplies. A clinic cannot be opened here because no doctor is willing to risk their own health by staying for prolonged periods in such a toxic environment. Being an unrecognized village means Wadi Na’am can lay no claim to national resources and services of this sort. When the villagers requested a new school, saying that the old one had become too small for the community, the authorities responded by constructing a wall through the old building, thus dividing it into two halves.
Not long after, I overhear the police have arrived. They turn out to be two short, plump teddy-bear-men in kippas. I am almost disappointed. Mahmoud, who has delayed his departure for the army reserves to negotiate with them, proves himself a devoted Machiavellian. The conversation happens quietly and with an almost English air of understatement. The background flicker of shutters on long camera lenses seems to be having the desired effect. The authorities don’t want to give the press too much of a field day and soon disappear back into their car and down the valley. Mahmoud, who has just been told he should have appealed the demolition decision in court, also rides off to consult a lawyer.
I am surprised that so few of the Wadi Na’am’s inhabitants have turned up to support the activists in their protest. A couple of locals mill about and one of the village elders arrives in his Sunday clothes, sits down and smokes a joint. A phone call later from Mahmoud, we learn that despite the apparent niceties, a demolition team with their bulldozers are already on their way to carry out the deed. One of the activists tells me about the thoroughness of the government’s demolition quota. A demolition team won’t consider it below them to travel into the Negev to remove a mere slab of cement planted into the ground of an illegal Arab settlement. At the same time, the demolition of a single shed in an “illegal outpost” inhabited by Jews (which by contrast would enjoy a connection to the state’s electricity network), would cause endless outrage and often not happen at all.
The activists decide to raise the pace of the building works. They get their hands dirty as they prepare more sand-cum-straw-cum-cement (that sustainable stuff) ready to plaster it all over the building’s back wall that needs thickening. Curiously enough, rather than jumping up to help them, local men instead opt for a smoke, chat and sunbathe.
Some of them watch in bewilderment trying and failing to understand the rationale behind the activists’ efforts as they continue to sweat over a bucket of makeshift mortar to complete a building that in several hours will return it its original liquefied state. The symbolism hasn't rubbed off on them at all.
I wander off downhill towards the shantytown. Despite a running tap attached to a water-tanker the face of a little girl, whom I meet on the way, is covered in dust and snot. She chews on a filthy baby-bottle, her skin has been eroded by some form of dermatosis, her mouth is covered in crumbs. We come to an understanding that her name is Rasha and I wander around in search of her mother, who needs to give her a good wash. As my search continues more children and women gather around me, eventually drawing me into one of their tents. Inside an older woman is praying, prostrating herself on her mat. They ask me if I’ve come to see “Mahmoud’s house” . “Yes”, I reply “Your community house, your mosque that’s being destroyed”. We stare at each other in mutual bewilderment unable to find a common idiom. I wonder how much destitution and state apathy is needed to run a people down to such a pitiful state of resignation. It seems that in this wasteland people have become numb even to their own misery. They have been left behind by a state machine, which doesn’t aim to serve all its citizens equally. They have only obligations and no privileges as the authorities inexplicably seek to punish an already dispirited community’s attempts at self-help. 80,000 Bedouin Arabs currently live like this. Forever in a state of uncertainty about what temporary stability will be snatched away tomorrow.
My feelings are mixed as I admit to myself that this last frontier of Israeli Bedouins’ ‘traditional way of life’ these activists’ are fighting to preserve, is not sustainable here in Wadi Na’am without change. The difficult decision they are facing is whether to abandon tradition, move to one of Israel’s ‘model towns’ for the sake of their children’s health and future, or to remain in Wadi Na’am in order to maintain parts of a conservative tradition that will not survive in a more urban environment, even though each day here shortens their family’s lives. But at the heart of this struggle (as of so many others in the ‘Holy Land’) is the issue of land itself. If these Bedouins take up the government’s offer of moving to a new town like Tel Sheva or Rahat, they will automatically lose ownership of the land they currently reside on and therefore forfeit any possibility of a future traditional, rural dwelling. Calls for a relocation to a Kibbutz-type alternative which the Bedouins would accept, have been rejected by the authorities with the argument that no new settlements must be built in the area or indeed in Israel as a whole.
On the other hand, the Bedouins of Wadi Na’am seem to have become victims of a traditional way of life, which, when put to the test, has proved itself stagnant, defensive and intransigent. One of the activists tells me that an ideological struggle has already broken out within the Bedouin community itself when debating Bedouin women’s rights to education and employment. The traditionalists claim the above will pose a threat to their community's traditions. Although Mahmoud’s mosque was built out of sustainable materials, some of his community’s choices and priorities are becoming so hard to defend.
But while the Israeli authorities emphasize the ‘legality’ of their demolition enterprise, it is precisely the bureaucratic nature and routine tone of demolition orders that is most disturbing. In August of this year, a demolition order was issued for buildings in Anata (North Jerusalem) under the Municipal By-Law for Maintaining Cleanliness and Order. The shantytown in question, home to the Jadua-Kabua clan of the Jahlin tribe (who are Israeli Arab citizens), was legally defined as ‘junk’ and could therefore be demolished under a law governing the removal of waste from public areas. By labelling villages like Wadi Na’am ‘illegal’ through development legislation the Israeli government legitimizes a routine timetable of demolitions as if these were a viable substitute for a positive, pro-active and considerate re-location policy. So the deadlock ensues, even as the erosion of the Bedouin community’s health, morale and property goes on unnoticed.
When we finally leave Wadi Na’am we are forced to drive around the corpse of a dog left to decompose in the road. For the animal it’s over, but there’s no telling how long for, the local residents will continue to be caught in the deadly, trickster, noose of this “zone”. After venturing here, us Stalkers will also remain marked for life. Such striking images of desperation are hard to erase from your memory and conscience.
I am lodged in a hostel in Jerusalem’s old city (a cave-like citadel with free Wifi) when I receive an important message in Morse code. Several mysterious phone-calls later I am at Yerushalaim’s central bus station. At the Tel Aviv departure point I meet the secret agent of an important undercover press organization. These are photographers who prowl around the country and the territories in search of conflict, protest, dissent, civil disobedience, violence - just my cup of tea. Tomorrow they are off on a new mission. An ‘environmentally sustainable’ mosque and community centre in a Bedouin village in the Negev - Israel’s southern desert, is up for demolition - the fate of so many public buildings and homes located in 45 of Israel’s unrecognized Bedouin Arab villages, that can be demolished quite legally by the Israeli authorities at any given time. In the case of the predicted demolition, we are told that activists and locals might put up a fight. After a short shluff at the headquarters, the photographers and I are on our way by sunrise.
The road takes us past the invisible coastline down a canvas of rolling clay hills. A turning towards Beer Sheva. We cross Highway 60, the main artery of the future Palestinian state, already fragmented between the PA controlled areas “A” and Israeli dominated zones “B” and “C”. The clay has now become a desert and the road cuts through it like a knife. The sun appears a yolk of orange and beyond the highway nascent pines are a scarce balding forest. In the distance the grey mirage of a ghost town and electrical lines leading us towards camel warning signs. The roadside is now littered with Bedouin shantytowns, meek goats, chewing camels, lined-up children. The stench of chemical waste hangs heavy in the air. Ramat Hovav, Israel’s National Site for Treatment of Hazardous Waste is these Bedouins’ next door neighbour. As a matter of fact, in 1979 this waste disposal facility was built in the spot where the Bedouin village of Wadi al-Na’am used to lie. The Bedouins were politely asked to budge up, which they did. Now they live next to what is effectively an unexploded nuclear bomb. This is what Ramat Hovav would become in case of an accident, endangering not only these citizens of the Negev, but the country as a whole as well as many of its Middle Eastern neighbours.
As we turn off the motorway and drive down a dirt road I hold my breath. There have been over 30 cases of cancer here over the past year. I feel like the Brothers Strugatzkys’ Stalker making his firsts incision into ‘the zone’, the landscape full of unknown traps and loopholes. I remember the Stalker’s lessons. This place only accepts those who have lost all hope. It is full of deadly snares, it is in constant flux and you cannot return the same way you came in. ‘The zone’ does not conform to any theoretical constructs. Here, you can only rely on your intuition. Shipwrecked on the rocks by the roadside, a small turquoise Fiat and its hapless owners stand back helplessly. Photographers from AP and Bleu I am told. Mahmoud, a Bedouin of a strikingly forceful complexion in military pants, grapples with the vehicle’s entrails. I am told Mahmoud is an exceptional man. Unusually for one of the locals he is educated, well travelled, probably the member of this community most integrated into Israeli society. He has built the mosque, now under threat, almost single-handedly. But on the day when the fruit of his labour is hanging by a hair’s breath, he has been called up for duty in the Israeli army reserves.
We ride on past. By the time we get to our destination I expect to see a full-on demonstration with police shields, rocks and rubber bullets. Instead we stop at the top of a hill, next to a terracotta-coloured carcass of a building. “Is this the mosque?”, I ask. Activists are huddled inside, still asleep, no action yet forthcoming. The photographers unleash their lenses and for a moment the objective of our mission blurs from political to artistic, all four of us fishing for the most comely image of this forlorn dystopia.
We meet Tess Lehrich, an activist from ‘Bustan’, an organization trying to promote fair allocation of resources here in the Negev, where like elsewhere, Jewish and Arab populations are locked in a struggle over land ownership. Together with Josh Berer, who was there to represent the Council of Unrecognized villages they emerge into the morning ready to do battle. Tess’s passion impresses, especially considering its only 7am. She tells me that Wadi Na’am, though it lies at a major junction of Israeli electrical supplies, is not connected to the national grid, nor to the telecommunications network or the water supplies. A clinic cannot be opened here because no doctor is willing to risk their own health by staying for prolonged periods in such a toxic environment. Being an unrecognized village means Wadi Na’am can lay no claim to national resources and services of this sort. When the villagers requested a new school, saying that the old one had become too small for the community, the authorities responded by constructing a wall through the old building, thus dividing it into two halves.
Not long after, I overhear the police have arrived. They turn out to be two short, plump teddy-bear-men in kippas. I am almost disappointed. Mahmoud, who has delayed his departure for the army reserves to negotiate with them, proves himself a devoted Machiavellian. The conversation happens quietly and with an almost English air of understatement. The background flicker of shutters on long camera lenses seems to be having the desired effect. The authorities don’t want to give the press too much of a field day and soon disappear back into their car and down the valley. Mahmoud, who has just been told he should have appealed the demolition decision in court, also rides off to consult a lawyer.
I am surprised that so few of the Wadi Na’am’s inhabitants have turned up to support the activists in their protest. A couple of locals mill about and one of the village elders arrives in his Sunday clothes, sits down and smokes a joint. A phone call later from Mahmoud, we learn that despite the apparent niceties, a demolition team with their bulldozers are already on their way to carry out the deed. One of the activists tells me about the thoroughness of the government’s demolition quota. A demolition team won’t consider it below them to travel into the Negev to remove a mere slab of cement planted into the ground of an illegal Arab settlement. At the same time, the demolition of a single shed in an “illegal outpost” inhabited by Jews (which by contrast would enjoy a connection to the state’s electricity network), would cause endless outrage and often not happen at all.
The activists decide to raise the pace of the building works. They get their hands dirty as they prepare more sand-cum-straw-cum-cement (that sustainable stuff) ready to plaster it all over the building’s back wall that needs thickening. Curiously enough, rather than jumping up to help them, local men instead opt for a smoke, chat and sunbathe.
Some of them watch in bewilderment trying and failing to understand the rationale behind the activists’ efforts as they continue to sweat over a bucket of makeshift mortar to complete a building that in several hours will return it its original liquefied state. The symbolism hasn't rubbed off on them at all.
I wander off downhill towards the shantytown. Despite a running tap attached to a water-tanker the face of a little girl, whom I meet on the way, is covered in dust and snot. She chews on a filthy baby-bottle, her skin has been eroded by some form of dermatosis, her mouth is covered in crumbs. We come to an understanding that her name is Rasha and I wander around in search of her mother, who needs to give her a good wash. As my search continues more children and women gather around me, eventually drawing me into one of their tents. Inside an older woman is praying, prostrating herself on her mat. They ask me if I’ve come to see “Mahmoud’s house” . “Yes”, I reply “Your community house, your mosque that’s being destroyed”. We stare at each other in mutual bewilderment unable to find a common idiom. I wonder how much destitution and state apathy is needed to run a people down to such a pitiful state of resignation. It seems that in this wasteland people have become numb even to their own misery. They have been left behind by a state machine, which doesn’t aim to serve all its citizens equally. They have only obligations and no privileges as the authorities inexplicably seek to punish an already dispirited community’s attempts at self-help. 80,000 Bedouin Arabs currently live like this. Forever in a state of uncertainty about what temporary stability will be snatched away tomorrow.
My feelings are mixed as I admit to myself that this last frontier of Israeli Bedouins’ ‘traditional way of life’ these activists’ are fighting to preserve, is not sustainable here in Wadi Na’am without change. The difficult decision they are facing is whether to abandon tradition, move to one of Israel’s ‘model towns’ for the sake of their children’s health and future, or to remain in Wadi Na’am in order to maintain parts of a conservative tradition that will not survive in a more urban environment, even though each day here shortens their family’s lives. But at the heart of this struggle (as of so many others in the ‘Holy Land’) is the issue of land itself. If these Bedouins take up the government’s offer of moving to a new town like Tel Sheva or Rahat, they will automatically lose ownership of the land they currently reside on and therefore forfeit any possibility of a future traditional, rural dwelling. Calls for a relocation to a Kibbutz-type alternative which the Bedouins would accept, have been rejected by the authorities with the argument that no new settlements must be built in the area or indeed in Israel as a whole.
On the other hand, the Bedouins of Wadi Na’am seem to have become victims of a traditional way of life, which, when put to the test, has proved itself stagnant, defensive and intransigent. One of the activists tells me that an ideological struggle has already broken out within the Bedouin community itself when debating Bedouin women’s rights to education and employment. The traditionalists claim the above will pose a threat to their community's traditions. Although Mahmoud’s mosque was built out of sustainable materials, some of his community’s choices and priorities are becoming so hard to defend.
But while the Israeli authorities emphasize the ‘legality’ of their demolition enterprise, it is precisely the bureaucratic nature and routine tone of demolition orders that is most disturbing. In August of this year, a demolition order was issued for buildings in Anata (North Jerusalem) under the Municipal By-Law for Maintaining Cleanliness and Order. The shantytown in question, home to the Jadua-Kabua clan of the Jahlin tribe (who are Israeli Arab citizens), was legally defined as ‘junk’ and could therefore be demolished under a law governing the removal of waste from public areas. By labelling villages like Wadi Na’am ‘illegal’ through development legislation the Israeli government legitimizes a routine timetable of demolitions as if these were a viable substitute for a positive, pro-active and considerate re-location policy. So the deadlock ensues, even as the erosion of the Bedouin community’s health, morale and property goes on unnoticed.
When we finally leave Wadi Na’am we are forced to drive around the corpse of a dog left to decompose in the road. For the animal it’s over, but there’s no telling how long for, the local residents will continue to be caught in the deadly, trickster, noose of this “zone”. After venturing here, us Stalkers will also remain marked for life. Such striking images of desperation are hard to erase from your memory and conscience.
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