Miki Kratsman // Territory
Hadas Maor
The series Territory was taken at Gush Katif during 2005, just a few months before the media-covered evacuation of the settlement and it includes photographs in black and white only.
The series exposes a silent, emptied out abandoned place in which the swing of settlement and wasteland flourishing seems to have evaporated or as if it had never really existed. The drama in these works is not in the ongoing occurrence seen in them but rather in the meaning derived from it. The series demonstrates the dimension of fracture embodied in the situation, in a principal absolute manner, without connecting it to the political or ideological stance in relation to its circumstances.
Kratsman’s choice of the unique photographic format that creates a dark halo around the image and a focus on the object at the center of the lens creates a past tense and produces a feeling of remembrance. By doing so, the act of photography serves Kratsman not only as a possible mediator of the act of lamentation, of separation, but also as a catalyst that wishes to urge it.
