Next Picture

excavation under museum floor
Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Israel 1997

curator: Raya Zommer

The Janco DaDa museum at Ein Hod is a modernist cube shaped white cage, that shows not too much sensitivity to the dada spirit nor to the site, casting its shadow on a once fertile piece of land on the slopes of Mnt Carmel. When the hall for temporary exhibitions, at the lower level of the museunm, was offered to us for a season, our first wish was to slowly fill it up with sand using a huge funnel that would function as a gigantic sand clock. The ticking of time would gradually transform a meaningless empty space into an equally meaningless full volume. By the end of the season it would become impossible to enter the hall and in fact impossible to see the work at all, except by imagining. However, budget considerations made us look for local resources rather than importing sand (leaving the original idea for a future suitable opportunity). A neat square was cut off and lifted from the floor, providing a gateway for undermining the foundations of the museum. With a pick, a shovel and two buckets, an illegal underground cave was dug, while the materials brought out of it invaded the upper hall and were treated and sorted as archaeological findings: dirt and stones, rusty nails, broken glass bits, roots and other organic stuff and even water. Finally, wheat was sowed and germinated from the toed earth spread on the floor.