ROME. «Every action of mine is accompanied by fear. But now there is no place in Be’eri that is not protected.” Tamar Suckman’s words echo in the room like a bitter prophecy. The woman looking into the camera with a calm look is one of the victims of the Hamas assault on the kibbutz on October 7th. She had participated in an art contest for the Be’eri Gallery, which was destroyed a month ago along with the lives of many people. But the works and stories of the inhabitants of the kibbutz on the border with Gaza come back to life today at the Maxxi Gallery in Rome in the exhibition “Ninety-five percent heaven, five percent hell”, curated by Maya Katzir, which will be possible to visit until tomorrow. November 19th.
In a 50-minute video installation, five videos made by six contemporary Israeli artists are projected. They tell the choral experience of life in Kibbutz Be’eri before that terrible October 7th. The first and last works – Smoke in the desert, Orit Ishay, 2023; Saluki, Tzion Abraham Hazan, 2019 – talk about war, a presence that hovers over the daily lives of all inhabitants. The other works describe aspects of common life in this place which for many is a “paradise” but which constantly looms over a minimum percentage of daily “hell” due to a conflict that has never subsided. «That day the gallery curators Ziva Jelin and Sofie Berzon MacKie remained barricaded for hours in the “safe rooms” of their homes, crying out for help in vain, while the horrible catastrophe unfolded outside – says Katzir -. Since the day after the massacre, all of us Israelis, inside and outside Israel, have suffered a very hard psychological blow that has persisted to this day. After days of depression we thought that that burned tunnel should not be destined to the end, to silence. So we asked Maxxi to host this exhibition and we immediately found positive feedback.”
The message that they want to send from Rome is one of peace, Katzir explains further: «Here there are many points of view, not only of those who live in the kibbutz, but also of those who look the other way knowing they are being watched. In Italy we don’t understand this complexity, but many of the victims of that October 7th were pacifists.” For Alessandro Giuli, president of the Maxxi Foundation, it was a “duty” for a place “of culture, art, dialogue and peace” to accept the curator’s request. «What matters today, in hosting this exhibition, is to remember that art survives horrors, that places of culture speak a universal language, of comparison, also of conflict and denunciation but always of respect – underlines Giuli -. Fortunately, there are antidotes to war. Anything that doesn’t take this into account is pure abjection.”