La Jornada: They present the catalog book of Cans of Palestine

The artist and filmmaker Rodrigo Ímaz assures that art has the possibility of influencing and inviting different actors and participants, from an empathetic level, to talk about topics that are not normally touched on because they are complex, such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His interest in showing the discrimination that a State exercises towards an ethnic origin is registered in Palestine cansbilingual book-catalog (Spanish and English) of the homonymous exhibition hosted by the Cultural Center of Spain in Mexico.

At the book presentation held last Saturday, Ímaz commented that this project began in 2017, when he was invited to Jerusalem to present his documentary Juan Perroswhich portrays a man who lives off garbage in Cuatro Ciénagas, Coahuila, and that experience led him to investigate what happens with the waste that is produced on the border between Palestine and Israel. The premise was to find keys to coexistence and territories on that invisible line between East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem. “I started to find the cans. At first they caught my attention because I am an engraver. That was the trade I learned at university. I have engraved metal and I thought they were very beautiful matrices. Then I discovered something that my fellow residents told me, the cans that have the One Shekel seal are produced in Israel and its State does recycle them; those that do not have that seal are of Palestinian origin and are not recycled. That is, they discriminate the cans based on their origin. We also see this division that exists between people the objects. The conflict in this territory is emblematic.

“The cans seemed to me to be the most subtle and silent way of mentioning a topic that they did not want to mention. The important thing about the pieces is that they dialogue, provoke, be read and criticized, because we are talking about what we do not talk about,” said the artist.

“Contemporary archaeology”

For Ímaz, finding those aluminum cans was “a kind of contemporary archeology” that allowed him to represent “the discrimination, injustice and irrationality in the way they treat the Palestinian origin of things and people.”

He specified that the work of art is not only the photographic result or the cans, but what involved working with the communities and approaching organizations that defend the rights of Palestinians.

The book, published by the Hojarasca label, in addition to the pieces in the exhibition includes ethnographic photographs that portray the landscape and contextualize the cans project. “For example, there is an image of a boy looking at a sign that says that if he goes to military service he becomes ‘human garbage’. It’s interesting because in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood they don’t use tablets or technology. All communication is still done with posters.

“There is also a photo of a man with his house demolished. When he showed me his house he told me: ‘they forced me to demolish it because I did not comply with the conditions.'”

The curator of the exhibition, Sol Vargas, commented in her speech that art exists “for many reasons, but I think it does have a very important mission, which is reflection, and this particular work by Rodrigo has a very strong reflection which is, as he mentioned, returning to an object, a reflection so that we do not see the object, but rather see the human.”

Likewise, he indicated that the publication includes texts as a guide that offers a context of the conflict. The authors are the internationalist Genaro Lozano; the Palestinian ambassador to Mexico, Nadya Rasheed; the curator at Art Cube Artist Studios in Jerusalem, Maayan Sheleff, as well as the artist and Sol Vargas.

In the presentation, José Carlos Balaguer, director of said cultural center, pointed out that remains such as cans can speak “of inequality, of the stories that are written in the matter, in the things that others throw away.”

He added that Ímaz’s work explores the relationships between art, territory, memory and social justice.

The sample Palestine cans It remains on display until June 28 at República de Guatemala 18, Centro Historico neighborhood, Cuauhtémoc mayor’s office.