A wind blows through the abandoned village

Raada Edon, an actress who is a fourth-year student at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, is now showing two video works at the Hagar Gallery in Jaffa. In "Aisha," she portrays one of the characters in her one-woman play, "Passatin," which was staged six months ago at the Acre Festival of Alternative Theater, where it received an honorable mention.

Aisha is a woman looking back at her life, from the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948 to the present day. The play was written by the author and poet Mohammed Ali Taha.

In the adjacent room, Edon is showing another work that was filmed in Lifta, an Arab village near the entrance to Jerusalem. Featured in this work are eight long, black dresses - bereft of body - placed in various spots around the abandoned village: in the pool; through a window; on a stairway; across the background of the sky.

The video works, like the play, are a response to the intifada. One senses that Edon, unlike her fellow students and Jewish peers, can't help but touch the subject. For them, it is an option; for her it is an existential need. Through the art, she expresses, protests and identifies. She refers to identity and to language in works that more than anything else reflect a longing for that which is no longer.

The two video works are fairly simple in terms of the production and the directness of their statement. Very little use is made of editing or of the technical possibilities of the medium, and the clips seem documentary more than anything else.

In "Aisha," the audience only sees Edon's face illuminated in a dramatic light, breaking out of the darkness. Edon plays a woman who fled with her family from the village of El-Sejera in 1948, and who since that time has refused to sleep with her husband.

"I was standing on a high rock, my daughter Ula on my chest and my son Abed holding my hand, and I walked up to the village," she says, in Arabic. "I went to houses that were in flames, through the fig and olive trees, the berries and the vines, to a place where I used to play with my cousins and the neighbors. I swore he wouldn't sleep in my bed until we came back to El-Sejera."

Asked by her husband in what way he had sinned, she replies: "No one defends the land and the honor but the owner. I stand by what I said. You may not sleep with me until we go back to El-Sejera." The years pass, and the husband dies, "with him not able to approach me or El-Sejera.

The entire monologue is rendered in Arabic. Quite intentionally, no translation appears in the body of the work. The translated script may be found on a table in the corner of the room.

It is important to Edon that she speak in her language, and important to her that the viewer make an effort to understand. "In the play I put on at the Acre festival, there was no translation either," she says. "Those who wanted to understand the play sat next to Arabic-speaking members of the audience, who would translate what was being said. That was most incredible and touching thing about the play. Contact begins with language."

Edon chose Aisha's character from among the eight characters she portrayed in the play. Despite the prodigious differences between the fictional character and the actress - Edon is 30, a native of Acre who lives in Jerusalem - she feels a great affinity for the character. "She is Palestinian and aristocratic. Despite the political situation, she has the sort of strength and pride that cannot be found in any other woman.

Palestinian women have strength," she says, and avoids answering when asked if she also defines herself as a Palestinian.

"I see myself as Raada. I have a connection to the Palestinian people and to the Israeli people, and I talk about the suffering the Palestinian people are going through. I can't understand how a people that went through the Holocaust and knows about suffering is capable of doing such wrongs and causing such suffering to others."

In the video work screened in the adjacent room, there is no dialogue, only the sound of wind, a breeze blowing through the abandoned village. Images of the empty houses and a sense of apocalypse symbolize the tragedy of the Palestinian people. The black skirts look like dresses for mourning. Scattered about the village - floating in the pool, placed on a stairway, glimpsed through a window - they further accentuate the emptiness.

The way they are positioned creates an interesting composition of the frame, imbued with an atmosphere of melancholy, but also of power.

The work ends with a shot of a dress blowing in the wind. The dress is filmed from below in a way that magnifies it to immense dimensions. It conceals a large part of the cloudy sky and intensifies the dramatic light coming from above. The final frame can be seen as being open-ended.

Works by Raada Edon at Hagar Gallery, Yefet 99, Jaffa. Closes March 8. Curator: Tal Ben Zvi.

	IMAGESOFMOURNING: Black dresses placed around the abandoned Arab village of Lifta accentuate the sense of loss and emptiness.