Base Pattern, 176x10x176, Synthetic jute, nylon thread, cotton thread, 2024
The beginning of this work lies in a map of Mount Zion from 1949 that Roy Cohen found in an archival file. The map, which was supposed to demonstrate the strength after the battles and be an official map of victors, was marked by hand with a marker, full of personal expression. The Nabi Daoud/David’s Tomb compound was clearly highlighted, with arrows and dots all pointing there. Cohen sees this act of marking as evidence of a personal point of view. In his work, he seeks to trace the tension between an official document and manual action, to trace the line drawn by a particular person, and to create a new map which is based on the original map, but at the same time uses sewing thread to highlight elements of concealment, exposure and emphasis on Mount Zion.
Synthetic jute fabric is used for wrapping fences and scaffolds and concealing new structures that will be erected on a certain land. However, due to the composition of the exposed material, the nylon and threads that make up the fabric easily unravel and are quickly destroyed. Thus, jute fabric embodies a thing and its opposite: the desire to hide something and the discovery of the impossibility of doing so.
Cohen's stitching is done on an entire bolt of jute. Through it, he connects the industrial with handwork and the two-dimensionality of the map with the typographic relief made by means of thread. This is stitching that is not intended to connect two pieces, since its action is like that of embroidery, and hence it emphasizes what needs to be repaired, the wound that exists in the heart of this one map. Cohen's map reveals the great pain inherent in the place: the layers, the entanglement, the buildings that were built for one purpose and turned into something else, the stories and events that took place in it which are constantly revealed and covered. The anthropologist and poet Zali Gurevitch described this well in his book “On Israeli and Jewish Place”:
"A place means not only a beginning but also an end; It must be finished, made specific, with a specific form – this is what places a place, marks a point, starts a perspective, draws a horizon, creates a world, makes a character, hangs hope, advances a plot. In a different manner, ending means a return, as in repetition, in the creation of a routine, as well as in coming back, in the possibility of returning, marking a way back. [...] In these two senses, of beginning and ending, departure and return, a place is a given and a creation; It is impossible to be without it, and yet it depends on establishment, not only in the physical sense [...] but in the cultural sense – the creation and transmission of language, text, myth, history, ethos, border, law. The socio-cultural concept, the discourse and the talk of the place, which involves relations and connection, even if hostile or negative relations, is what defines a piece of land, a point, a landscape or a structure as a place. A place is established and located among people, within concepts, thereby opening itself to diversity and change, to cultural relativism, and to inexhaustible human invention."
Zali Gurevitch, On Israeli and Jewish Place, Ra’anana: Am Oved, 2007, pp 10-11.
written by Rinat Edelstein
