Joseph Dadoune-Sion

The project Sion (2002-07) fuses Dadoune’s previous films in terms of the issues with which he is concerned and the mental components distinguishing his world. At the same time, however, it presents a more intricate situation and takes a more explicit stand which does not seek mending and reconciliation. The work consists of two films under a single title: a 12-min b/w film which was screened at the Paris Louvre Museum in 2006, and an hour-long color film making its world premiere in the current show. Shot in [the southern town of] Ofakim, the West Bank Jewish settlement of Teqoa, Jerusalem, and the Louvre Museum in Paris, the work addresses the fate of the lamenting, maternal, exiled, persecuted, rebellious and punished Sion. Sion is a personification of Jerusalem, enacted by actress Ronit Elkabetz as a multi-faceted woman with numerous identities and mindsets – the main character that sets the plot in motion. With a unique visual language combining spiritual cinema with art, Dadoune sketches an allegorical piece about Jerusalem, with all the burden of history carried on its shoulders, a weight that often left it wounded and bruised, and yet – a proud eternal entity.
Jewish history, primordial landscapes, the Judean desert and the Negev, the sights of the town of Ofakim – all these assume a new dimension of power and strength that culminate in a political-cultural act formulated through a performance taking place inside the Louvre – a powerful institution and the very heart of the Western cultural establishment. With a meticulous aesthetic design and a cinematic language rich in imagery, Dadoune situates the Jewish position at the forefront of his artistic statement. Using the Hebrew text and a distinctive Hebrew typography supports the affinity with a biblical-Hebrew world.
In Sion Dadoune expands his engagement with identity and the artist’s status as a shaman capable of causing change. The approach familiar from his previous films, aimed at stitching the tears in personal identity, is abandoned in favor of a broader, national position that presents a cultural vision, and takes a stand regarding the West’s approach to Sion/Jerusalem, and the latter’s status within the West’s canonical culture. The director’s visit to the Louvre several years ago was the trigger which influenced his desire to formulate a stand and protest the absence of Sion/Jerusalem from the wing devoted to the Levant civilizations – a documentary pantheon where peoples of the ancient East that have disappeared are represented, while Sion and the Jewish people are conspicuously absent. At its peak, the film portrays a penetration into the West’s Holy of Holies, the Louvre, where an act of code-changing takes place. In the Levant Wing, devoted to perpetuation of the art of the Near East, and wherefrom the traces of her biblical past are absent, Sion walks in royal dress, declaring, through her very presence, a process of rectification and healing. It is an act of correction which corresponds with the Jewish “tikkun olam” (world correction or reform) as well as a type of artistic empowerment.
The film presents a struggle between matter and spirit, between East and West, between Judaism and Christianity, between the crime and its punishment, and between logic and madness. Sion is a real woman, but also a mystical-religious entity and a universal icon that embodies a state of mind and a general mindset toward Jerusalem. Sion, where the origins of the link between East and West are rooted, expresses the tragedy and melancholy which Jerusalem projects onto the world.
Recently completed, the film Sion offers closure to a cinematic process which began at an autobiographical-personal point and ended with opening of the lens and expansion of the gaze to the status of Judaism and “Sion” among the nations of the West and the Middle East, in order to emphasize and reinforce their cultural-spiritual status in the world.

The first film in Dadoune’s trilogy, Universes (2000-03), is a self-portrait that proceeds as a road movie toward a physical experience and a mental world of images with a regularity of its own. A myriad of worlds devoid of spatial or temporal landmarks fuse reality and myth into a journey that evolves as a response to the daily confrontation of and within a blend of identities: Western culture, Judaism, the Mediterranean, Europe, the Middle East, Zionism, war, superstition, periphery and center. The film brings together the experience of sequestering underlying the town of Ofakim, the artist’s childhood domain, and refers to the destitution and solitude from a unique personal perspective, which consciously and overtly skips from daily plights through the choice of nature to inspiring biblical vistas, where the artist applies various rituals to his body and surroundings, yearning to return to the archaic, primordial, and mystical as an act of personal and cultural empowerment.Universes is a film of mindsets, images, and sounds that do not obey a narrative framework. Still static pictures, which underwent a special scripting process, generate slow images of movement akin to a seismograph of consciousness. Silent pictures, occasionally replaced by ones accompanied by the artist’s singing voice and screams, invite the viewer into a meditative experience of introspection and plunging into private chasms of imagination and spirituality as a type of pure experience that recalls confrontation of an a sublime abstract painting.The personal work introduces references to Jewish and universal sources, feelings of anxiety, suffering and guilt pertaining to mother-son relations, preoccupation with the body, and an attempt to stitch the rifts of private-personal existence of an identity split between Israeliness and Europeanism, Orient and Occident, secularism and faith. Death and life, interlacing in images of purity and impurity, beauty and abjection, generate a new and different entity where nature, cosmos, and man unite to form a single entity without any visible partitions. Alongside the similarity to ancient rituals of sacrifice, bloodletting, the body’s anointing and sanctification, or alternatively – its punishment and lapidation, Dadoune also alludes to the bleak events of the present in this region, where the future of civilization is still at stake.

Chant (2005-06) is an intermediary work between the film Universes and the project Sion; an autobiographical piece with a documentary dimension, it re-presents the rifts previously introduced in Universes. Shot in Ofakim, Teqoa and Saloniki, the work sketches a self-portrait, a divided polar identity. It portrays a set of political-cultural interrelations between East and West, and attraction-rejection feelings toward the artist’s body. The film addresses forbidden passions oriented toward the male body, presenting an intricate dialogue between victim and victimizer. It introduces questions pertaining to male violence and the power relationships between different types of masculinity, power arrangements, and paternalism. The film refers to Western stereotypes of manhood that pose the Mizrahi man and the immigrant as inferior, “pre-modern” to use scholar Ella Shohat’s terminology, or as an embodiment of the diasporal Jew whose body is weak, flawed, and effeminate. The main scene in the film features a brutal, violent ritual, thrice repeated, juxtaposed with desert landscapes familiar from Universes.
The forsaken frontier landscapes, the sounds of the desert, and the figures that populated Dadoune’s childhood setting – such as the Bedouin roaming in the wilderness, whom he feared as a child, or the wild dogs that barked in the fields across from his neighborhood – all introduce the issue of marginality: life in an outlying town whose textile factories, the backbone of its economy, collapsed one after the other; the sense of being sequestered, the atmosphere of withering in the periphery, and an immigrant’s perspective.
The title Shanti was borrowed from the term “shanty town” which refers to informal settlements consisting of shacks and tin huts erected spontaneously in rundown neighborhoods in the periphery of cities in countries such as Morocco and South Africa, whose inhabitants suffer from extreme poverty, health and sanitation problems, and grave unemployment. Ofakim is Dadoune’s ‘shanty town,’ and he inserts codes into the work alluding to destruction, to a type of apocalypse, such as the black smoke slowly billowing in the silent static landscape of Teqoa as a place of political conflict, or the ewe lamenting her dead lamb.
The film’s simultaneous projection on two screens situated back-to-back forces the viewer to physically and sensorially experience the dichotomies and contradictions presented in it, as he is compelled to move around the screening object constantly, disallowing the viewing of the entire picture at one time.