The reaction of teamCAESUUR Subject | open letter to the city council of Vlissingen Middelburg, Thursday, October 25, 2018 Dear members of the city council Vlissingen, On Saturday, October 20, ruimteCAESUUR organized the art campaign ‘Flying kites with CAESUUR’ on the beach in Vlissingen. The frame of reference for this action was the controversy surrounding the release of kites in the Gaza Strip. On the one hand kite flying is a leisure activity that is regularly used for peaceful protest actions (for example in 2010, when breaking the world record kiting). On the other hand, pilots are used to fly combustible materials and small explosives to Israeli territory and cause damage to them. Although no human victims have occurred so far, livestock has been killed and considerable land and nature have been destroyed by these actions. The state of Israel responded to this with unsparing violence. Sharpshooters shoot down civilians, the majority of them unarmed: children, journalists, aid workers, in fact everyone who comes within the distance of the fence that gates Gaza. Although Western media often produce an image of more or less balanced mutual violence, the methods and effects of violence between Israelis and Palestinians are completely disproportionate: according to Amnesty International's latest report on Gaza*, which is based on international research. Al Mezan Center for Human Rights recognized, more than 150 Palestinians have been killed during the demonstrations since the start of the peaceful protests. At least 10,000 others have been injured. Among them are 1,849 children, 424 women, 115 paramedical care workers and 115 journalists. Among all these injured, 5,814 people were struck by sharp ammunition of snipers. According to the Israeli media, one soldier was slightly wounded by shrapnel grenades and one soldier was killed near the gate by a Palestinian sniper. Dissatisfaction about this inequality, which usually remains underexposed in the media, was the starting point for the pilot action for initiator Hans Overvliet. By taking the controversial and ambiguous form of kites used in Palestine as the basis, the project aims to bring about a discussion about the complex mix of power, representation, violence and play, aspects that are unmistakably linked to these kites. The fact that this is perceived as controversial by a number of people is understandable, because it undermines the simplistic view, established in some circles, that Palestinian kites are now an unequivocal source of evil. In this way, challenging a debate by potentially controversial action is, however, something very different than simply glorifying terrorism, as some comments on the project have suggested.
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Twenty artists around the world were invited to design a kite in this context. The task was not to make a kite about the conflict in the Gaza Strip (although this was a possibility and some did so), but to take the situation of unequal power and violence that exist in this specific conflict as a reason to reflect on power and violence in places or in situations that are important >>> to them. The result is therefore a very diverse collection of kites. The basic shape of the pilots and the starting point of the project have a connection with the conflict in Israel / Palestine,
