An Eternal Clash

Through Rubber-coated Rocks, the story of David and Goliath could not be more powerfully evoked, nor more effectively relocated from the cultural imaginary of “Biblical lands” to the currently occupied territories of Palestine. The materials involved are stone and rubber: nature found at-hand and nature transformed by technology. Stones are no match for bullets, even bullets whose impact is blunted by a coating of rubber. The material irony at work in this piece says more about the asymmetrical nature of military power between Israel and Palestine than reams of ineffectual UN reports and hours of “embedded” media footage. Precisely because its meaning is not mediated; it is materialized. The irony here does not deliver a mere conceptual punch-line. Instead, it delivers a counter-punch to the moral gut.

The mise-en-scene of the piece invokes gravity and places the viewer immediately on a street in Gaza or Jenin, where a hard rain of bullets and stones has just fallen. The viewer is implicated as a witness. Not one whose access to the scene is mediated by a tele-visual distancing from the event, but a witness who is present at the scene of a crime. Whether a conscientious objector or an apologist, the viewer cannot in good conscience turn away from this morality play, staged once again to remind a world without memory that might does not make right: lessons of old and eloquent testament.

The arrangement of the rocks in a line stretching along a horizon of possibility, between gallery floor and wall, dares the imagination to imagine things otherwise. And the evocation of lines – of people cueing under the hot sun, at a checkpoint that demarcates a threshold of possibility – imposes a sense of urgency to the mise-en-scene. This is a matter of life – of technology vs. bodies – and the viewer is forced to take a position. This is an inside view for those outside, a satori-like perceptual shift provoked by a poetic intelligence making contact.

Kenny Strickland -Writer, Filmmaker