We are SimanChe.Alama: a social art collective.
Working mainly in public space, our projects draw people away from their screens and into real encounters, where real stories are shared and then amplified in a way that doesn't just make them louder, but also leads to real cross-boundary conversations.
We often aim to create forms that last in time, so that these conversations will continue for longer than the encounters that gave rise to them.
Reality Mountains 2023
Theatre play.
duration: 8:40
idea, script, direction, masks.
Documentary satirical play based on a recently declassified document of the Israeli
state archive from October 1967 recording the minutes of the meeting in which government ministers decided how the new land maps should be drawn, after the territory that Israel controlled had multiplied manyfold during the six day war.
NEAR COMPLETION: Nur al Fahm
2022-2024
Solar Light Mosaic for the entrance of the public library of the Palestinian-Israeli city of Um al Fahm, Israel.
2,5 x 2,5 x 0,60m
A relief inspired by the shape of the charcoal stacks that gave the city its name.
These reminded us of Claude Monet’s series of haystack painting, which Wassily Kandinsky famously mentions as facilitating his revelatory moment of realisation that a picture didn’t need to have a subject.
Kandinksy forgets to mention that the Islamic art tradition had been predominantly abstract for some 1200 then.
Nur al Fahm combines the shape of the charcoal- and haystacks with Monet’s distinctive color palette.
The Al Araqib Tapestry 2021
Communal embroidery created together with the inhabitants of the unrecognized Bedouin village of Al Araqib, which at the time of the project had been demolished by the Israeli authorities 192 times (at the time of writing that’s about 220 times).
synthetic cloth, cotton and synthetic thread.
0,55 x 27m.
The embroidery is directly inspired by the famous icon of world art history, the Bayeux tapestry, created anonymously in 1077 AD.
Like Bayeux, Al Araqib’s is the story of a conquest. But told from the perspective of those who non-violently refuse to be conquered.
PROPOSAL: National Monument for the Welcomers of the Persecuted Other - Arnhem, the Netherlands
Light Mosaic for the city of Arnhem, the Netherlands,
using a popular local guerilla poetry initiative to address and attempt to
cool down the burning issue of refugee migration.
The poem in Dutch - by us as well - reads:
are you fleeing
from the desert or from the flood
from violence or from boredom
from too many people or loneliness
did you have to leave, more than you wanted to come here
en can you not understand the words
in which you are being told
what to do / where to go / and at what time
do you look back
and see nothing
but destruction, emptiness,
one big black hole
have you forgotten what it is
to be able to make your own voice heard
rather than only being the subject
of other people’s debates
then, come here, to these shores
welcome to the city where I was born
IN PROGRESS: ‘In Light of’
A project in progress. Pictured is an impression.
Solar light mosaic for the city of Nazareth. Each ‘box’ (tessera is the technical term) presents a story written and told by a local resident of the city.
Then, at School, on the Wall a Picture
2021 - ongoing
Art - science collaboration with the Psychology of Intergroup Conflict Reconciliation lab of professor Eran Halperin at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The goal of this collaboration is to develop new visual material for primary school classrooms in Israel and Palestine, that will increase outgroup empathy.
Through Two Points Pass Many Jagged Lines
2021
Solar Light Mosaic, communally created with a group of (perchance all female) elderly residents of one of the oldest neighborhoods of one of the oldest Jewish towns of Israel, Ramat Eliayahu in Rishon Le Zion.
Clay, epoxy, led lights, solar panels.
Solar Light Mosaic, communally created with a group of elderly female residents of one of the oldest neighborhoods of one of the oldest Jewish towns of Israel, Ramat Eliayahu in Rishon Le Zion.
All migrations are thoroughly complex stories, hence the variation on the 1970’s song title.
The shape of the clay tablets reflects the world’s oldest instances of writing, the Sumerian clay tablets found in what today is South-Eastern Iraq - an area from which some of these ladies migrated to Israel.
‘Cuneiform & co.’ 2021 - 2022 - 2023
This project we did simultaneously with ‘Through Two Points…’
Also inspired by the world’s very first instances of writing, children received a workshop challenging them to consider the differences between word-based and image-based communication.
They then went on to write a word - often they chose their own name - in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform.
Meteor
Shower 2018
Solar Light Mosaic
‘Ceramical’ clay. approx 2,40 x 1,50m.
Permanently displayed from the exterior wall of the public library of Yeruham, Israel.
In this project in the developmental town of Yeruham, southern Israel, some 20 Palestinian and Israeli youths gave physical shape to a visual element of their childhood home views.
The combined pieces formed the shape of both a fingerprint and a night sky view of a meteor shower, an environmental phenomenon observed every year around August (when their workshop was held) in the Northern Negev desert area.
Create Your Own Evolution 2016 - 2017
An educational workshop at the intersection of art and science, conducted i.c.w. evolutionary biologist Jelle Zandveld, PhD, and offered to an array of primary and secondary schools in the Netherlands between 2016 and 2018.
Based on the premise that when making consecutive series of drawings, the same three principles are at play as in the evolution of life - variation, selection, and heredity - students were invited to reflect on a question the scientific jury is still out on: what did the first life form on Earth look like? And how exactly did we get from that form, to the plethora of species alive today?
Just + Ice Cream 2016 - 2017
Just*Ice Cream was conceived as a social enterprise as well as a social artwork.
Back in 2016 it occurred to us, partly inspired by the Dutch phenomenon of the socially responsibly produced chocolate Tony Chocolonely, that it might be a powerful move to create a brand new ice cream brand, to be produced entirely with Palestinian ingredients, thus at once supporting the farmers suffering from settler violence, and offering them a mouthpiece to communicate with the rest of the world directly about their daily struggles and occasional small victories.
→*** There is a video that goes with this project. Origins length 17 minutes. Wondering whether to include it. Perhaps a much shorter edit. What do you think?
PEACE TEAM 2012 -2015
Based on two existing societal phenomena/ initiatives:
1) the ‘Orange-craze’ that holds sway in all of the Netherlands every 2 or 4 years when the national soccer team reaches the Euro or World Cup;
2) an initiative by the Peres Peace House that ran from 2006 - 2009 in which joint Palestinian-Israeli ‘peace teams’ played friendly ceremonial matches against prominent European clubs such as FC Barcelona and AC Milan;
the idea here was to create a shared visual identity for a non-existing joint team.
Black Box / Song of Love 2010
Mural. mixed media.
4,5 x 21m.
Permanently on display in the stairwell of the Academy building of Leiden University (built in 1502), first to second Floor.
Mural on student life in the 21st century, as a response to a mural made in 1865.
In 1865 only boys were allowed to study at Leiden University, and the number of non-European students was zero. So I chose to tell the story through the experiences of a female international
student.
The end point of our protagonist’s journey shifted from a seat at a UN-body to the raw direct action of feminist groups like Pussy Riot, and the incredibly brave Egyptian icon of the 2011 revolution Aliaa Magda ElMahdy.
IN BETWEEN TIME 2021
A performance about animals’s daydreams, still life, and living stillness, that combines audio recordings of bird conversations, and short videos taken from the neighborhood into a healing shamanic ceremony.