page_title: Ilana Salama Ortar
section_title: Civic performance art (1995-present)
hierarchical_section_title: Ilana Salama Ortar / Work / Civic performance art (1995-present)
caption_attribution_description: English: Model of the Villa Khury/Prophets Tower (Haifa) that was the basis of the installation project developed in the Prophets Tower mall in 1995. Français&#160;: Modèle de la Villa Khury et centre commercial Tour des Prophètes (Haïfa) qui servit de support au projet d'installation conçu dans le centre commercial en 1995.
context_page_description: Ilana Salama Ortar is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work focuses on issues of migration, uprooting, exile and architecture of emergency.
context_section_description: Civic Performance Art includes projects realized on site over periods of several months or years. It involves research, installation, drawing, painting, performance, experimental video, documentary filmmaking, and architectural model. Civic Performance Art examines the effects on individuals, communities, cities, and landscapes of situations of arbitrariness and domination. It exposes the State of Emergency that pervades all levels of people's experience when they are displaced physically (immigrants), socially (in rundown districts) or politically (by war and occupation). Civic Performance Art engages such diverse fields as philosophy, history, anthropology, and political science along with media, cultural theory, memory, and trauma. It revolves around three key objectives: to make visible stories that were erased and activate them as site specific performance, to produce visual critical documentation, and to create spaces of dialogue between local communities.
  The main projects of Civic Performance Art are:
  Villa Khury / The Prophets’ Tower, Haifa (1995-2001)
  The project focused on the Prophets’ Tower, a glass-and-steel mall built in 1979 in Wadi Nisnas at the very place of the Villa Khury, an emblematic site of Arab resistance during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. It made visible memory layers of the city and brought the mixed population of Haifa to exchange around them. It was based on collecting testimonies via questionnaires and interviews, and creating installations and performances in downtown Haifa public spaces.
  The Camp of the Jews, Le Grand Arénas Transit Camp, Marseilles (1998-2013)
  Through excavations conducted with the local population, architectural reconstruction, sound installation, mappings, drawings, and interviews, the different projects explored the history and architectural structure of the transit camp Le Grand Arénas. The camp was built near Marseilles in 1945 by architect Fernand Pouillon for regulating postwar population movements. It served in the 1950s as transit camp for Jews from Arab countries and Holocaust survivors, and later on as settlement for Maghreb migrants and social outcasts until it was destroyed in the 1960s. Ilana Salama Ortar published the book The Camp of the Jews in 2005, with texts by Yona Fischer, Zvi Efrat and Sophie Wahnich.
  Adamot, Land without Earth and Corporeal-Memory (1989-2010)
  The work combined two projects dealing with the notion of bare life, drawn after Giorgio Agamben, and referring to the borders between Israel and Lebanon and Syria respectively. Land Without Earth focused on the unilateral transfer of fertile soil from an area under Israeli Defense Forces control in Southern Lebanon to Northern Israel in 1995–1998. While realizing a documentary movie on the subject, Ilana Salama Ortar came upon a young Druze man who had lost half his body in a landmine explosion when he was fourteen. He asked her to film him. The movie Corporeal Memory covers two time periods: the first is a journey into the past via a flashback to his childhood, the second focuses on his progress in the present. Both border areas described in the works were or are under Israeli control and experienced war. They subsist in a constant state of emergency, or State of exception.
caption: Model of the Villa Khury and Prophets Tower used in the installation at the mall, 1995
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