Raz Gerber

Mother Earth vs. the Political Father

I examine the two-way influence of the landscape on the people who inhabit it and of the people on the landscape. Through a symbiotic relationship, the landscape becomes a place. The search for a place through photography led me to an investigation and documentation of the boundaries that delineate and distinguish one place from another, creating a unique identity. The observation of borders, I realized, offers a glimpse into the depths of the place, what is seen outside it, and what was pushed out of it.
The compilation of photographs in the exhibition depicts the border and landscape as seen from the Hebrew University and Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, an area in Jerusalem known as Mount Scopus, where I have lived and studied for the last four years. Wandering and documenting along the border of an area that I know well allowed me to formulate a unique perspective on the place in the photos. The area reflects the incongruity between the primordial landscape and the engineered, manmade landscape. A landscape that holds history, economy, culture, and politics. In some of the photographs I present evidence to the foreign elements that made their way into the landscape, creating visual conflicts and serving as a visual metaphor to the complex story of the Israeli sphere in general and the Jerusalem sphere in particular.