Home/Soil/Homeland

In October 2018 over a seven-day period, Israeli artist Tali Zori, staked a temporary home on the rooftop of an abandoned office building in central Jerusalem as part of a city-wide annual arts festival, Menofim. Titled Zero. Home. Earth the social practice project was comprised of three distinct habitation structures—a sleeping unit, a hospitality unit, and a utility unit. Futuristic living pods smattered with soil were installed against the cement surfaces of a failed 1970s development enterprise. Committed to communal sustainable life, Zori created a model of a home that trans-locates soil into the urban fabric as the battleground against capitalism’s part in on ecological degradation and climate change. Promoting a zero-impact lifestyle of minimal and wholesome consumption, Zero. Home. Earth put forward what Zori referred to as “dream outlines for the utopian city.”

In my paper, I critically reflect on the project’s rhetoric and its implied silences, severing the environmental from the political discourse. I will explore the conceptual trio of home/soil/homeland within the post-Zionist nation-building context and its associated utopias. The paper is part of a larger study I am currently developing, that brings together artworks deploying soil as a central material and media to reflect on questions of property and ownership, belonging and place. Zori’s futuristic soil pods installed in a building adjacent to the city’s major outdoor market—that is battling major forces of gentrification—serves as a focal point of multiple competing narratives about home, community, nation, and global planetary well-being.