Ha Aretz

Abraham’s divine calling represents one of the most symbolic moments in the history of humanity. In contrast to the builders of the Tower of Babel, the prophet trusted the voice of Yahweh and began a long journey to the Promised Land. And although archeology has never been able to confirm the historicity of Abraham, his epic journey—both physical and spiritual—constitutes the embryo of the great monotheistic religions. The impulse that led Abraham to abandon everything to go to Canaan connects with the existential question that articulates the photographic project Ha Aretz (‘the land’ in Hebrew), the result of a decade of travels through the territories and countries that today make up the ancient Holy Land (Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, among others).

Following the paths of the Bible with historiographical precision and anthropological intention, Ha Aretz is presented as a contemporary commemoration of the landscapes and cities of the Holy Land, photographed two millennia after the events narrated in the Sacred Scriptures. Starting from the accounts of Genesis and Exodus, the project runs through the punished epidermis of a land of overwhelming history. Under the sieve of contemporary conjunctures—dominance of capitalism, technology, globalization and war—the series is based on a rigorous investigation that dialectically confronts biblical texts with landscapes shaped by the human being in a territory as symbolic and venerated as it is wounded and commodified. Where to place today the role of faith—the great engine of human history—in a dystopian present, where science seems capable of explaining a good part of reality while techno-capitalism threatens to modify it, or even destroy it?

In intimate resonance with the biblical narrative, Ha Aretz examines the phenomenon of progress through the ancestral regions of Phoenicia, Samaria, Galilee, Judea or Philistia (present-day Gaza), cradles of civilizations and epicenters of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. From Nazareth to Bethlehem, from the Judean desert to Mount Sinai, from the Jordan River to the Red Sea, the scenarios of the Bible appear here as bipolar spaces of pilgrimage and suffering, in a world of bloody borders that points to a lost spirituality. In Ha Aretz, nothing points towards the miracle. Despite the blinding light that floods the images, a poetic darkness reigns. The divine presence is not glimpsed on the summit of Sinai, nor in the rite of baptism in the Jordan, nor even in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Judas betrayed the Nazarene in exchange for thirty pieces of silver. Maintaining a precise distance in the images—both physical and emotional—, Ha Aretz points to the cruel fracture between that atavistic symbolism and this present, marked by infamy.