Eficacia o arbitrariedad judicial – arbitral

Again I go up to Jerusalem. I felt today as if it was the first time I arrived to the city. Opposite to my eyes the same naked mountains, the same empty fields and the same thought troubling the heart: how to revive these mountains, how to plant trees in them. I am happy that the wilderness has persevered, it must be because our land has expected us (Empty House, 2012[a]: online).

figure 17. Google Maps, 2018. Armon Hanatziv (Talpiyot Mizrah) neighbourhood, Jerusalem.

This quotation was placed on one of the open call posters for Empty House

Kibbutz DIY inviting people to take part in building and living in a Kibbutz

(figure 16). This quotation was taken from the diary of Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi in 1919. Ben-Zvi was an educator, author and agronomist who built an educational farm in what is today the Armon HaNetziv neighbourhood in east Jerusalem (figure 17). According to historical research conducted by Empty House, the educational farm was active between the end of the 1920s until 1948. The goal of the farm was to train Jewish girls for agricultural work. The farm included a nursery for ornamental, fruit, and forest trees, a vegetable garden, chicken coops, beehives, and a dairy barn. At the end of the 1930s the British authorities built another structure next to the farm that was part of the Arabic college, which shared a similar goal of training Arab girls for agriculture. Ben-Zvi’s vision was to give girls the knowledge and training to cultivate the land, as well as to build their socialist consciousness through collaborative work (figure 18). In 1948, the farm moved to a different location in Jerusalem, yet the area was still used for agricultural purposes, mostly run by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem until 1967. During that time, the area

was considered a demilitarised zone under the supervision of the UN. The farm area was located inside ‘the green line’ - the recognised border of the Israeli territories signed during the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon – and on the Israeli part of the demilitarised zone. Yet after the area was annexed in 1967 a new Israeli- Jewish neighbourhood called Armon Hanatziv or east Talpiot was built and considered by the international community to be an illegal settlement. At that time the farm was abandoned and the territory remained an open space owned by the Israel Land Authority. For a long time there were efforts by the Council for Sites Conservation to declare the area a historical and nature site, and revive the educational farm, as one of the plans by the Israel Land Authority is to change the designation of the area into a hotel district. According to one of the Empty House members, the area is currently being flattened and a hotel is due to be built (Empty House, 2012[b]).

Figure 18. Empty House, Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi (second from the Right) and the Educational Farm, 1928. In Empty House, 2012[a].

Kibbutz DIY can be understood in terms of a re-enactment, that is the

practice of re-performing or re-doing artworks and real-life events as a means to reflect, critique and explore a real or imagined form of life (Ben- Shaul, 2016; Schneider, 2011). Re-enactment, as Schneider (2011: 4) puts it, is “a battle concerning the future of the past”. At the same time re-enactment – when it involves a critical and reflective revision of the past – is concerned with the present as it becomes an act of survival, teaching us how to keep ourselves alive (Ibid).49 _{I briefly described Muslala’s Between Green and Red}

(2012, 2013) as a re-enactment of a historical moment of collaboration between two national groups. It involved both retelling the past, emphasising untold local and marginal histories, and re-contextualising the moment as a reference tool for learning how to get along in the present. Both aspects were given equal importance as the project was divided into two parts – the constructing of the project, and the launch of Between Green and Red event. The re-enactment performed by Empty House in Kibbutz DIY is different in two ways. First, the Kibbutz is one of the symbols on which the Zionist narrative is built. As the quote at the beginning of the section shows, the Kibbutz is connected to other Zionist values of pioneering, communal life, agricultural and labouring work, and conquering the wilderness. Second, the core element of the Empty House projects is the process of planning and construction which takes several weeks to months, rather than the final result, when it is open for a few days of events for the public. For Kibbutz

49 _{The re-enactments in discussion are re-enactments within an art context. In contrast,}

historical re-enactments aim for the most accurate and detailed performance. They are often understood as a patriotic act, such as the case with historical battle re-enactments (Schneider, 2011).

DIY the construction took three months including the last week in which the

space was open to the public.

The relationship of Empty House Kibbutz DIY with the past, and the utilisation of the past to produce a new aesthetic assemblage, is the centre of discussion here. To understand this relationship I examine the ways in which Empty House addressed the concept of the Kibbutz and its historical implementation.