Working Title WM III+IV, 2010
HD-Video, 9:06 min
Water W Woman, Melon M man. And behind every scene there always is another scene... The only people who pick watermelons in Israel are men coming from an Arab-Israeli village called Manda, near Nazareth. Why? They say they are professionals, very much stronger... and have been the ones picking watermelons for decades. [The first mention of Watermelons in the area was in Egypt 5000 years ago]. The only way to look at landscape without political blindness/barriers/guilt and also without romanticism is looking down at the earth/ the sea/the street/ones feet with the camera, facing down. Like looking at a map, and at a text. "Working Title WM" is a wake to the monumental work 'DeadSee' of 2005, a work where some 500 watermelons were composed, linked and juxtaposed in a different gravity – metaphoric, dead and sterile. In "WORKING TITLE WM" the fruit is removed from its growth stem, lined up, and collected. In the diptych I show several men throwing individually one hidden melon at a time, passing the heavy fruit from one to the other - they are many pickers and the green explosive melon is removed "one at a time".