The video Mount Herzl takes place in the military cemetery of the fallen soldiers in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. In 2022, Laufer placed two security cameras that recorded entire nights. The many hours of recording were then condensed into a single night and edited on two channels that present the same occurrences from two vantage points. The viewpoints switch channels every few minutes, introducing movement, jolting the viewer, and prompting new motivation to engage (like in a security system control desk). Here and there, a pair of eyes emerges from the darkness, and following them, a jackal moves among the graves, climbing on top of them before disappearing. Rain falls and stops, the path lights switch off and the day breaks. There is no sign of the wandering animals. The last shot is in color and shows the shiny wet stone path and the dark green cypresses immersed in the morning mist, and the words on the headstone are legible: Tuvia Ordang, Laufer’s grandfather, who hit a landmine and was killed in the war. In this work, Laufer suggests a division of time and place along discrete axes that exist simultaneously: the obvious distinction is ostensibly between those above ground and those beneath, the living and the dead. Yet the separation of day and night creates another fault line: dividing the kingdom of day, ruled by humans, from the kingdom of night, ruled by animals. The dead remain dead.
written by: Mira Lapidot
