In Search Of Kafka

Archival Research and Photography, 2009

Price’s initial research for Quarries of Wandering Form was sparked by Howard Caygil’s talk on Franz Kafka’s “Accident Prevention in Quarries,” featuring 14 photographs either taken or commissioned by Franz Kafka of quarries in former Czechoslovakia, in 1914. These images were part of the industrial safety report which Kafka produced in his role as senior official and theorist at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. The images provided visual illustrations and evidence to reinforce the report's safety guidelines. The photographs are rumoured to now be in private collections in Jerusalem and Price wanted to raise questions about how the meanings associated with these photographs have evolved through their relocation to Israel and Palestine.

In exploring how Kafka’s photographs could serve as protagonists to encounter histories of displacement, exile and catastrophe in Israel and Palestine, Price fly-posted photocopies of the quarry photographs around Jerusalem. The accompanying text asked of the whereabouts of the photographs. In search of Kafka’s documents this act where Kafka’s photographs merge with other material fly-posted on walls and boards around Jerusalem.

Quarries of Wandering Form (2014-17) is a body of work that incorporates photography and moving image to unearth the environmental, economic, geological, and political aspects of the quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank (OPT). The work emerged from five years of research in the region, where a highly contested set of relations between individuals (workers and owners), institutional forces (military), and broader constructs (nationalist identities and sovereign states) unfolded - relations overdetermined by the century-old settler colonisation of land.

The work consists of the film White Oil and a series of photographs , In Search Of Kafka, Widow,Birzeit, Geology of Disaster and Ashdod. These works explore the quarries as industrial spaces where labour, excavation, and expropriation of raw materials take place. And as an archive and cipher for the day-to-day lives of Palestinian workers, revealing narratives surrounding colonialism, land expropriation, and mobility.

RELATED WORKS AND RESOURCES
Quarries of Wandering Form
White Oil
Birzeit, Geology of Disaster
Ashdod
Widow
World of Matter

≡

WORKS

TEXTS

ABOUT