One day in August, one of our colleagues received photos by e-mail from her artist friend in Israel. The sender Tamara Moyzes, originally from Slovakia, has studied at an art school in Jerusalem and now studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague, Czech Republic. She went back to Israel as an exchange student in early 2003 and has been busy video taping activities and events there. Apparently, some time in August she read about an international peace conference to be held in the West Bank town of Ramallah and decided to cross the border and go for it. At the checkpoint she was stopped by the border guards, the soldiers, but pushed them away and ran into the occupied territory. She managed to participate in the peace conference and heard that afterwards Arafat would hold a press conference limited to just 10 journalists. She managed to push herself in amongst the 10 and met Arafat. It was of course after the Israeli bombardment of his compound. She asked him about his home and eventually remarked, “your house is in a terrible state, you have to live here?” To which he replied, “Well, this is reality.”
This is the story behind the photo entitled “Me and Arafat”. We decided to include it in the Womanifesto project “procreation/postcreation” because of this simple question:
Where else on earth has so much blood been spilt because of a myth?
