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Sodom

SODOM / ESHETLOT

Sodom, both a mythical place and geographical and historical site, is transformed by JP's art into a vivid theatrical vision, speaking to our current times. This poetic and political production is the result of multilayered research crossing archaeological layers of taboo and longing.
The biblical story of Lot's wife is read anew from a contemporary political perspective: Lot's wife is a refugee escaping an air raid on her town, while two of her daughters remain under fire. She stops and looks back. Her gaze disobeys the divine injunction "do not look back." She is punished, turned into a pillar of salt. 
The biblical story is woven together with archival materials recovered by the artist,  diary entries telling the story of anonymous female workers at the potassium factory in Sodom in the 1940s. The  workers are They too refugees  escaping  the war in Europe, and like Lot's wife, they too children, are torn from their mothers a condition of their work in Sodom. Their previously unheard voice, coming from the distant factory and from the depths of the archive, bears witness to their insubordination. 
The stage is set with apocalyptic images from the real and surreal workers camp of Sodom, whose revenants still stand, though have been deemed a historic site with no entrance permitted: workers' huts surrounded by fields of salt, a red river of bromide and a movie theater carved in a cave.
 
The Sodom project fills the stage with a dense web of connotations and contexts: Sodom of the Sea of Death, destruction and bareness; Sodom of the nameless women making their voices heard; Sodom as a field of perverse sexuality and a facade to a history of homosexual persecution.
Sodom and Lot's wife are rediscovered as contemporary symbols: land bombed from the air, and a woman demanded to obey her husband until she no longer can.

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Escape (words) games

And his wife will gaze through the clotted mist:
Her wedding night, the heavy dress cloth, her ill daughters
The workers are blotted, mixing dust, whispering prayers,
Poisonous plots inc, mourning mothers,
looking back
Through plotty roads, with blistered feet,
Voices a lot: who are they dreaming of? zealots! helots!
Girls squirming, failing, breaking.

Great God of plots!
A great love like Lot's

Bed of Sodom

Lot gives his two younger daughters to be raped by the masses: "And Lot went out and shut the door after him and said, I have two daughters who have not known a man; , I'll bring them out to you, and you do to them as is good in your eyes" (Genesis). In this small bed, the sheet is stretched by a machine, tempting and hypnotizing our gaze towards the hole, the trauma. The bed, like the cement mixer, is an object that is a body.

Luti - cinema in a cave

To make life easier for the factory workers, a cinema was built inside a cave in Mount Sodom. All that is left of the cinema cave is a wall with a small window where the historic projector stood in the 30's and 40's.

The term "Luti" means sodomite in Arabic and appears in the Quran about 7 times. is derived from Lot's name.

The cinema in the cave sparked my imagination and I started to fantasize biblical Sodom, or that of the Quran, as such with an active queer scene. Maybe even one with a drag club?

So, we are talking about desert's mirages, right?

Let's get back to the cinema at the Zionist Sodom, maybe the screening goes wrong and the multi-layered luti the biblical, Quranic and contemporary luti goes out of the screen and on stage for his last drag show before the divine bomb. calling Lot's wife – or whoever it may be – look back, turn around!

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A text written by a female worker in the potossiom factory in Sodom 1930-1948 - Salt on a white wall

Remains of the potosiom factory in Sodom 1930-1948

Paper heart pearl

Paper heart pearl

*Award winner for best stage design and artistic concept of the Israeli fringe theater national contest 2015*
 

"Seven little girls
Seven little pearls
Tiny and bright in their dresses and curls
Climbing trees or on a swing
all the little pearls sing
In a choir they are singing along
a prayer or a pretty song."

Director and Co-creator: Hannah Vazana Greenvald 
Actresses/Creators: Anat Sonnenfeld and Rotem Goldenberg.
 

Pnina sinks into her inner world, the world of paper figures. She is unable to separate between a skin tissue and paper, between one child and the countless figures. She cannot tell between the annihilated reality and her savior imagination. On top of hospital beds she spreads a visionary dream-like-nightmarish conscious space, in which the simple and static paper figurine, from the early works, starts moving on stage in a limited and lyrical way. She evokes questions on mother-daughter relationship, society, sexuality, and gender

From the press:
 
"..A rebellious and anti-establishment voice...the play excels in imaginative design and an unconventional view on the world that it creates from the connection between poetic text and the special design...Pearl herself performs the role of the narrator in a fine and ironic delivery...

The Hedgehog

The sun-heated water tank technician is a transgender, a hybrid character of a man-hedgehog. One day he meets a woman, a paper figurine, on the roof.

The love story is located in a typical Israeli slum, which one of its stand-out visual characteristics is an endless view of water-heaters, an expression of the intense poverty and lack of space. They are both outsiders, possess a scattered identity of body and mind, homeless. An endless horizon of sun-heated water tanks spreads in front of them, suggesting a hope for love. 

The Hedgehog is a puppet theater project that unfolds a whole life. A paper figure trying to escape her childhood home, drawn to fantastic landscapes inside her soul, scary, magical, a reflection of her dreams and fears. She arrives in the abandoned poor side of town with a small suitcase. The paper figure and the technicians wander around. They share an inevitable tragic faith. They struggle to have a different ending, where gender and social classes cease to exist, where they could make peace with their outsiderness, where anomalous can receive love

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The Hedgehog
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Archaeology of a paper figurin

Archeology of a paper figurine

An archeology of a doll-figure This exhibition accompanies my theater play, "Paper Heart Pearl". The exhibition shows a retrospective of 17 years of work with miniature puppetry. The main theme is a repetitive, fragile, compulsive paper figure.
It is small, almost torn, easy to destroy, wrinkle, and ruin. It is intensive, stuffed, and full of visual and emotional redundancy.
The surrounding of the figure is full of details, labyrinth-like, gentle as lace, and resemble relics or inner organs, a heart, a womb. Some spectators felt while seeing the exhibition it was highly dense, almost autistic, uncomfortable and unbalanced. As if, the paper was full of dream and reality simultaneously. I want to show a process that refers to an archeological process, brushing off the dust to see a broader, more ancient and complex history of the character, a story long gone.
17 years in "paper figure years" equals 10,000 years. Ink goes dull, the paper goes yellow, breaks; gets buried under the years passed by. The history of this figure inspired theater maker Hannah Vazana Greenfeld to create with me the play.
The exhibition accompanies it and allows the spectators to go deeper in familiarizing with the paper figure, seeing a rigid universe of creation and emotion, which caresses and hurts at the same time.

The feather archivist

The feather archivist
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Work in progress.
When my father was young he adopted a falcon.
Now, after his death I'm back to check The father-daughter relationship through the myth of Icarus and Daedalus Undergoing a gender reversal.
A real feather archive
Is the stage and conceptual space through which myth and relationship are examined.

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©2024 by Jackie Pearl. Design by LIFTOFFF

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