Travelling the World in a Single Country is an artistic project with the goal of celebrating the diversity of Israeli society, which is a novel kaleidoscope of profiles and faces of many origins.
Short video presentation (1 min. 37):
Draft example the documentary (10 min.34) :
Examples of solo interview’s :
T h e O b j e c t i v e :
The news about the conflict in the Middle East has erased the unique reality of Israeli society, which brings together not only Jews and Arabs, Christians, but also Jews from more than 120 countries. Israeli society is a mix of races, cultures, and languages in the framework of a tolerant democracy, which few countries know, especially if one considers the state of war that weighs on the country.
The Israelis form a “global” people in the sense that all of the world meets here. It is not a country of immigration like the United States, Australia, or New Zealand, because it is a country with an ancient identity, which has made it a chosen geographical place in the memory of humanity. Israel is also different because it is the will of this unique gathering of people and cultures to be carried by the idea that they form a people, a single people, above and beyond their diversity.
This is what the prophetic biblical heritage promises when it envisages an “ingathering of the exiles,” a messianic horizon auguring the converging and the unity of humanity “each person in their uniqueness.” (“Each in the names of its god,” Micah 4, 5).
We are far from the usual stereotypes about Israel.
We propose to set up a cultural work of two dimensions that bring together photography and cinema, which will have as its goal to show the reality of an Israeli population with many faces.
The human face is at the center of our gaze, in all its colors, forms, whether European, Asian, African, or Latin-American ….
A photography exhibit will report this multiplicity and this variety.
Jonathan Pierredon, the French artist who founded this project, will take his camera to several cities in Israel in order to take the portraits of all of these human types. His work will also be the opportunity for a film. During all of the photo sessions, a camera and a microphone will record the stories of the people behind the faces, the hopes and experiences that brought them to Israel and the ways that they think about the country. The film will mix faces with personal stories.
In the twelfth century, the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela had to traverse the world, Europe, Africa, Asia in order to get to know the many facets of the Jewish condition of his time. He recorded his descriptions in a book, The Voyages of Benjamin, like Marco Polo would do one hundred years later. Today we can travel the world in a single country.
T h e P h o t o g r a p h y E x h i b i t i o n :
The “collection of faces” and the compilation of personal stories. In order to assemble our kaleidoscope of a thousand faces, we will explore village and neighborhood in large cities that have the character of communities of a certain origin (the Yemenites, the Bulgarians….)
We will set up our photography studio in every house that will invite us in.
We will take a series of portraits there and photos that are representative of their space. We will also spend time with objects that are important to them, whether because of the use they make of them or the sentimental value they attach to them.
We will take advantage of these privileged moments of encounter to do our interviews. In this way we will collect their personal histories and those of their families, and will try to understand how they got to Israel, what life they had before, and most importantly what living in this country today means to them.
The collection of these personal stories will permit us to give depth to the simple portraits.
The Photography :
We will make use of the very first techniques of photography. Photos will be developed- immediately on a metal or glass plate. Such a technique unconsciously invites people to look at the photographs with the eye of a historian or an ethnographer.
It takes a bit of time to make a photograph, and this wait time creates a certain intimacy favorable to the interviews that we are collecting.
Jonathan Pierredon will be the artist behind the camera who will put the models in motion and capture their souls so that they will come alive on a simple plate of glass.
T h e E x h i b i t i o n :
These different elements will permit us to create a photography exhibition that includes an interactive video installation.
The photos will be exhibited and organized along “geographic” lines: the portraits will be grouped by country and community, and visitors will be able to move around the different regions as if they were moving around a map of the world.
One can even imagine that each group of portraits constitutes a particular atmosphere, specific to the country of origin in question.
The visit to the heart of these different regions will be accompanied by explanatory texts that retrace the history and origin of the Jewish communities of the world.
Within each community, each photo will be accompanied by a written extract of the interview.
The visitors will also have the possibility of “bringing to life” the exhibited snapshots in front of them and of discovering the sequences of the video interviews. This will constitute the interactive part of the exhibition.
The exhibition will therefore mix two fields: the historical field relating to the destinies of the different Jewish communities across the world, and the field of the personal stories of the individuals who traversed the globe in order to settle in Israel. The exhibition will relate the big historical picture with the personal stories in order to create a new perspective on Israel as the ultimate multicultural society and in order that its identity made up of many faces might shine.
F u t u r e e x t e n s i o n s o f t h e p r o j e c t :
The elements collected for the exhibition will provide the material for future extensions of the project, through different media.
· The publication of a book presenting photography and text:
A text by Professor Shmuel Trigano as well as extracts from interviews will accompany a selection of photographs that will constitute a beautiful coffee table book.
· A documentary series presenting each community :
For each place, each community, we foresee spending a day during which we will take the photographs and do the interviews.
The day after the photo shoots, we will look for contextual elements to film, such as the town itself, the houses, various objects, etc… in order to give further cultural depth to the photographs.
Afterwards we will pass to the editing in order to create an episode dedicated to a community.
The editing of the dialogue will be supervised by Professor Shmuel Trigano and the general editing, integrating the contextual elements and the different visual displays of the portraits will be done by Jonathan Pierredon.
After having created several episodes, it will be possible to envision a single film tracing the histories of the different communities.
· A website including all of the projects:
The website will include all of the content of the other projects without showing them through the selective filter of the format of each one and will therefore permit all those who, for example, have seen the exhibition to deepen their knowledge of the subject.
The interviews which will have been shortened for the documentaries will be presented in their entirety and all of the photographic portraits will be available.
· The production of documents that will be available to all for a future historical project.
This would require the archiving of the work and its availability to the public. (more precisely a public of researchers, academics, but also novelists and film directors etc...)
T h e t e a m o f T r a v e l l i n g t h e W o r l d i n a S i n g l e C o u n t r y
Jonathan Pierredon
Jonathan Pierredon is a French artist who had the original idea of the “Travelling the World in a Single Country.”
In the past he worked on a similar project for the Cornelius Foundation, in collaboration with the photographer Gideon Mendel. The goal of the project was to retrace the portraits and of the life paths of the inhabitants of the little village of Lagamas in France, combining all the generations.
The same photographic technique and the same process of photography-interview were used for that project.
One can see a part of the work by following the links below
A film that presents the work of Jonathan Pierredon with this photographic technique:
The first montage of his interviews (password lagamas) :
An interview about the photographic work of Jonathan Pierredon carried out by the Indian filmmaker Venkat Damar within the framework of an exhibition at the Off Festival of “Photo Encounters”
This work has enabled Jonathan Pierredon to develop a vision, an approach to photography in direct relation to our project: the question of communities today, their relationship to place, and to history. These will be the axes around which “Travelling the World in a Single Country will be built.
Otherwise, in the framework of his audiovisual activities, Jonathan Pierrdon created a video installation which could be perfectly integrated into the framework of our exhibition: an interactive video installation which could invite the spectators themselves to participate and to include themselves in the giant portrait of the community depicted by the project.
An English presentation of the video installation can be consulted by following this link
Professor Shmuel Trigano
Shmuel Trigano will supervise the conception of the exhibition in its entirety, and more precisely from the historical viewpoint.
Shmuel Trigano is an emeritus professor at the University of Paris, author of 25 books, of which many are collections about Jewish history, and director of the Association Dialogia.
Dialogia
Travelling the World in a Single Country is a project developed by the Association Dialogia
Dialogia has the goal of clarifying the intellectual issues facing French Jews in Israel and to make sure that their intellectual heritage, far from isolating them, will enrich Israeli culture and thought, which are confronted with the challenges of a new era.
With this approach in mind, Dialogia is launching a series of projects and proposes a series of cultural events in French and in Hebrew, which will erect an intellectual bridge between the Jewish thought developed in France since WWII and debates in Israel.
Dialogia thereby opens the debate on the questions and issues related to identity, culture, the public sphere, education, Jewish thought and history, the message of Israel, democracy, contemporary society and culture, as they are being considered in the Jewish world and especially in Israel.
Dialogia is the reference point for the Franco-Israeli intellectual scene.
The project Travelling the World in a Single Country fits naturally with Dialogia’s perspective, because it gives faces and features to the idea of “the Jewish people.”