The pastoral is a literary genre depicting an Arcadian setting governed by Pan, the Greek god of shepherds and flocks, populated by herdsmen, nymphs and satyrs engaged in romantic love. It originated in classical literature, with the classical poets Theocritus, Virgil, and Longus who were active in the 1st to 3rd centuries BC. This literary type enjoyed prominence in 16th to 18th century European literature and art. The pastoral depicted nature and rural life as an idyll refuge from the sophistication of urban life, and presented the idyll of simplicity underlying rustic life. Even in its early artistic versions illusion was imbued with the pastoral. While hiding the cruelty and suffering in shepherds’ lives, the pastoral scenes idealized nature. The Hebrew title of the exhibition, פסטורעליה, is a play on words: פסטורליה denotes the pastoral genre or pastorality; the addition of the letter ע introduces the word רע (= bad, evil) into the pastoral, alluding to the misleading nature of the pastoral appearance; hence the English title, pestoralia (a combination of ‘pastoralia’ and ‘pest’).

Naama Meishar has installed a scrap of the pastoral inside the gallery: a poplar grove on a surface of Eucalyptus leaves—an installation that produces a piece of pacifying, luring Israeli landscape. Meishar’s poplars have a serene, idyll appearance. Their trunks are slender, their stature high, their foliage silvery, their tenderness professed, and their magical façade conceals their being a tree unpopular among gardeners and landscapers: their root system is considered “violent” due to its ability to penetrate old sewage systems and their tendency to grow offshoots which deviate from the original architectural plan, thus rendering them subversive and threatening to planners. Meishar’s poplar grove is planted in black plastic pots. Unconnected to the place, it is mobile and nonaggressive in terms of its spatial expansion.

While the pastoral forest is indeed unthreatening to the landscaper, it is nevertheless exposed as an arena of political and social power relations and domination. Thus, for example, at the entrance to the gallery pipelines are raised from their linear arrangement, transforming into a wild, chaotic element which calls to mind the destruction of greenhouses and uprooting of olive groves by Jewish settlers in Palestinian villages in the Gaza Strip during the second Intifada (Palestinian Uprising). Furthermore, via a series of sculptural situations combining dolls and vegetation the viewer is exposed to mundane acts of violence: military and civilian occupation of land, violence against women and children, and an attempt to eliminate the Palestinian landscape, thereby gradually realizing that the pastoral quality of the Israeli nature and landscape is an illusion—pestorality.

Let me describe two of the vegetation sculptures:
I. Several hybrids—crosses between air plants and toy soldiers—are situated in a circle as in a pagan ritual whose rules are unknown to us, possibly alluding to a distorted military parade, possibly to a war game that has gone out of control. The soldiers carry the plants in their bodies, becoming entangled as in a trap, shooting at their reflections on the cold stainless steel surface.

By means of air plants Meishar articulates a critical approach to the Zionist-Israeli relation to nature which perceives the landscape as a space to be dominated, and open lands—as a potential for real-estate development or a land reservoir for an agricultural project. The air plant acquires its water and mineral supply from the dust and moisture in the air, rather than through a root system. A nomad imported from Latin America, it is unable to strike roots and become indigenous. Meishar uses it as an antithesis for the rooted Israeli; as an incarnation of the old image of the diasporal wandering Jew rejected by Zionism. To Meishar the air plant thus offers a reaction, a return to a more cautious, less dangerous option for assimilation into the space, but the plastic soldiers’ feet barely sustain their stability.

II. On a green lawn Meishar presents children in nature: naked babies and girls dressed in white (an allusion to the Jewish festival of Shavuoth, Pentecost) from whose body oak saplings emerge. Oak is one of the most popular Eretz-Israeli trees in JNF’s planting enterprises, generating a planned natural Israeli forest as a vehicle in creating Israeli identity. Lawn is a necessary element in every Israeli garden: an expression of the aspiration to color the rocky landscape with uniform Western green. The lawn is a surface detached from the ground; it is imported and portable. The infant motif recurs in various forms in the installation, indicating Meishar’s awareness of the role of mothers in the children’s education for love of Israeli nature.

The analytical dimension of “Pestoralia” culminates with Yaron Ben Haim’s video piece: Landscape Guide, which proposes an alternative reading of the origin of tress and their cultural meaning. The Guide refers to notions such as shepherd, sabra, oak, Jerusalem pine, gradated terraces, and drip irrigation. The lexicon’s chapters begin and end with two documentary processes which describe a shepherd and his flock in a forest near the “Burma Road,” and the JNF plant nursery specializing in trees for forests in the center of the country. The poetical beauty of the shepherd’s progression with his flock in the forest and the industrialized aesthetics of the manicured nursery are interrupted by interview excerpts incorporated into the film. The conversations with the shepherd and the nursery employees expose how the shepherding and the laborers’ work are regulated in a manner that weakens groups and individuals—the Palestinians and the Mizrahi women living in immigrant villages and development towns. It thus turns out that the hierarchies applied to trees, which acquire priority on account of changing foresting trends, are also valid when it comes to Israel’s citizens who are sorted into classes and ethnic groups.

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Local 2: Pestoralia

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