instance 3 the politics of materiality
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Michel Foucault describes space as a repository of relationships of control. Indeed, the phenomenon of territorial segregation through found materials caught our eyes while conducting ethnographic research in the unrecognised settlements in Abu-Quaf, near Beer-Sheba. Almost every structure was surrounded and almost hermetically sealed by improvised fences. These spatial manifestations were a rather new occurrence. The eclectic choice of materials, their random built tactics and visual manifestation – simple and raw yet appealing and aesthetic – are curious and raise various questions. This material and spatial design, the result of a growing threat of movement, insecurity in their way of life and the institutional pressure to drive the Bedouin population to live in settlements, reveals a creative shift towards segregation and material boundaries. Trying to appropriate, even symbolically, their land, leads local Bedouins to almost camouflage their ancestral land, in the face of growing governmental stress. As a result, past tactics of segregation via natural topography gave way to improvised boundary-building through found and mundane materials such as old car tires, rusted chassis, scrap metals. We can clearly recognize a material change in the Negev, brought by a clash between local culture and modern political processes. While the Bedouins, princes of free movement of the past, presently prison themselves behind makeshift fences, we can see a growing manifestation of spatial segregation. It seems that the meaningful pressure perpetrated by the government is taking its toll on local land owners, manifested in these instances of materiality. Facing this stress, the Bedouins use a fast, cheap and efficient material solution, manifested in found materials.
all images, Sharon Danzig
from the top: Fence near Tel Sheva in the Negev
Sheep pen, west of Za’arura junction in the Negev Border between agricultural fields using car chassis, the Negev
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
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