V'la'ir (and to the city)
During a visit to Tel Aviv in March 2012, I found a piece of graffiti downtown using an excerpt from “The streets take off slowly", a poem by Israeli poet David Avidan. The line that struck me the most was:
"and to the city, there is no beginning and there is no end."
I wanted to magnify this idea onto the city of Tel Aviv; I began to learn Israeli Sign Language and signed the sentence against the light from an empty slide projector, leading to a magnified “speech” projected onto buildings in the suburb of Neot Afeka in Tel Aviv.
I am interested in the multiplication of ideas through language as a standardised medium, and the loss that occurs through standardisation becoming a space open for personal interpretation – its precise lack of fixity, similar to Wittgenstein's notion of language games. The references of a word are not fixed, but they gain meaning from context. In parallel, the ambiguous shadows of the signs do refer to something pre-defined, and the context is the actuality of the audience's environment.
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