A Gardener at Midnight: Travels in the Holy Land
Peter Lyssiotis, Australia
| A Gardener at Midnight:
Travels in the Holy Land; Peter Lyssiotis,
Australia Before the camera, The Great European Powers sent expeditions into the Middle East. The pretext for these expeditions was a religious one. An artist would record the pivotal sites of Christendom; such as Jerusalem, Cana and Nazareth, accompany these images with a text then publish a record of the expedition as a book. If you were reading your Bible in Paris, Lisbon, London or Madrid you could refer to these books and see what that distant place looked like (I suspect the mapping done on these expeditions laid tracks for later military adventures). One such book, David Robert's The Holy Land; Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia (1842-1849) became one of two main references in this work, A Gardener at Midnight; Travels in the Holy Land. The other is the recorded episodes of cultural vandalism of Gulf War II - the looting of Iraq's National Museum and especially the destruction and looting of the three main libraries in Baghdad and the subsequent burning of books for the sake of CNN's cameras. Having read Robert Fisk's reports in The Independent, I imagined myself there, with him at the burning and looting. Borrowing the wings of the Magic Realism of Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Edmund Jabes I alighted in Baghdad and like Fisk grabbed a pile of papers in a folio from the ashes and they are what you see here. The images are scarred and damaged because of their history. The formal question which these images contend with is how much of an image is it necessary to see before your eye completes the picture? The images therefore take their cue from ancient amphora, which when reconstructed by archaeologists are seldom complete, yet the missing parts, not only deepen the mystery but also offer our imagination a chance to engage and fill in what is not there. So these images and this fabulist text are part of a re-imagined journey. What A Gardener at Midnight does is look beyond the lyrical, beyond the fable and checks off the names of these places: Ramala, Gaza and sees conflict, blood, holy wars - the void. |