The memorial day for the fallen soldiers of Israel and victims of terrorism is a ritual, held each year in the same format without gaps, but the number of fallen is changing. The ceremony is an endpoint and a starting point in a cycle of friction, violence, struggle and fighting. As if the ritual had come to keep this circle of loss and to justify that this cycle should be going on.
Here in this work, the images focus on preparations for the ceremony. Nothing is quite standing still. The soldiers are dressed in unrepresentative uniforms. They practice their steps again and again. And examine them in the same frame, above that stage.
On one of the days I took pictures, a soldier approached me and asked what I was doing. I explained to her, and she wondered while answering: “Why are you taking pictures of soldiers? Soldiers are not nice.”
The next day an officer approached me, he was concerned that his soldiers will not look good in the photos I took because they were not wearing their representative uniform. At this moment I remembered the sentence that the soldier had told me the day before.
A man mowing the lawn (video 2017)
The dead sandbags (video 2018)
(The project was presented as part of a photography workshop led by Davi Barell and Yaara Gur-Arie at Zilumbaam)