White Oil
HD Video, 2014-2017
White Oil - Trailer 3 mins single screen film
White Oil engages with the interstices of a number of genres; photography, documentary, the cinematic, fiction and testimony, with ethnographic methodologies playing an important role. Filmed in a number of locations in the West Bank images are highly composed and imbued in the language of the static frame, the durational image and the aesthetics of delay. Essential to the making of the film was the participation of quarry owners, workers and security guards where the role of the artist, as filmmaker, activist and ethnographer coming under scrutiny
The film unearths 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 colonization of land.
Context
There are over 350 quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank. The saffron coloured limestone excavated is termed the 'white oil' of Palestine and is the only raw material available to support the Palestinian economy and provides a livelihood for over 20,000 workers. However, of the stone and sand excavated from the quarries 65% is expropriated by Israel for the construction of Israel, and to build the illegal settlements in the West Bank, with Israel also exporting the stone internationally and claiming it as their own product. Bound to the history and visual vernacular of occupation through bylaws in Jerusalem, the stone is used as a conveyor of emotional messages around notions of a sacred city and ‘homeland’ for the Jewish people. Today almost every hillside in the West Bank is scarred by the brutal incision of the quarries. The land is pillaged and defaced, its wound left open to reveal a 'geology of disaster'.
The work consists of the film White Oil and a series of photographs , In Search Of Kafka, Widow, Birzeit, Geology of Disaster and Ashdod.
Quarries of Wandering Form
In Search Of Kafka
Birzeit, Geology of Disaster
Ashdod
Widow
World of Matter