Orderly ephemerality

Series name: Ordered Transience

Ordered Transience (Reconstruction of Transience), January 2022

Pencil drawings each: 23*33 cm Texts approx.: 10*23 cm

What happens when transience is reconstructed, is it preserved?

In the following collection of drawings and accompanying texts, I examine the boundary between spontaneous and innocent transience and its rearrangement. I ask - is it possible to reconstruct transience? Does reconstruction prevent it from existing?

Magical forays (in 1977 to 2001) into a culture foreign to me, to new places sometimes without knowing where. A hand on the map to choose the next place and so on rolling from point to point.

For 4 years, during which I studied industrial design and my partner Oded studied physical education, we traveled the world during the holidays, each year filling ourselves with experiences and returning for a new year of learning. During the year, we studied and worked, and with the money we saved, we chose a destination.

When you try to rewind time and repeat an experience, it will never be the same because we are living beings moving forward, in thoughts, experiences, and actions. There were destinations that we reached again after a few years, the place had changed, and the first innocence in meeting the place had faded. What really characterized us as travelers was the openness to see, learn, and experience the people and culture at the destination we arrived at. We both didn't like to impose our culture on the local residents and wanted more to observe and experience them.

Innocence was everywhere, sometimes a poor understanding of the situation could have ended in disaster (and we were close to it more than once), but there was definitely something magical about it. We weren't the rockets dressed and organized in 100% equipment that matched the place, we chose the route in the moment and on the spot. We used what we had accessible and if necessary we rented equipment in the moment for a specific purpose.

For me, this transience turned us into two in front of the world. I didn't always understand then how big and powerful nature is.

I allowed myself not to think beyond the moment, something that today really barely happens in the responsible reality of my life and perhaps all this innocence existed because the feeling of two allows us to lean and my partner definitely made that possible.

Every time we arrived at our destination, we would wash our clothes in the sink in the room with boiling water, spread out yellow ropes in the pizza room. In China, certain areas had problems with hot water/electricity and more, so a simple commodity like water was problematic. What is customary in hotels in China is that a hotel employee sits on each floor to provide assistance to the guests on that floor. Each room has a large thermos for making tea, and at the end of the hallway, the hotel employee has large thermoses filled with hot water to replace if the thermos in the room runs out. We used the thermoses for laundry, every few minutes one of us went out to change the thermos, the hotel employee at the end of the hallway didn't understand how much tea we were consuming.

Hanging the clothes and moving on reminded me of the transience and innocence that accompanied these trips. Such transience that I cannot recreate on a new trip, and I chose to recreate it in the way I record and use the pages that, as soon as I attach them together to our hanging laundry, connect in my mind pieces of memory of these magical moments that were primal and full of innocence.

About the work-

I painted the transience that accompanied our two-month trips around the world. I started from the point and the desire to recreate the transience accompanied by innocence and magic, and slowly I realized that it would be an ordered transience, because at the time it was accompanied by innocence and the attempt to recreate it is documentary and not spontaneous, which makes it orderly.

In an attempt to illustrate the innocence that was, I realized that I had to say goodbye to it because it would continue to exist only in thought. The process of reconstruction itself, which goes through a processing process in my head, makes the transience orderly.

I decided to go all the way with the encounter between documenting the transience on the page in drawings and arranging it in space with a rope and clothespins. I hang up my spontaneous transience for repeated observation and thereby make it orderly, devoid of naivety and innocence, but pleasant, thereby accepting that it is left behind and reserved for another time.

Placing the works hanging on a clothesline in the corner of a space so that the clothesline is stretched back and forth twice, creating space to hang works on two levels with yellow clothespins, similar to the pictures: