Prologue: Connecting the dots

Prologue

"When I was twenty years old, I read an interview with my favourite Israeli cookbook author. She confessed that for years, her life seemed like an incoherent ‘connect the dots’ game. She was a chemist by profession, as well as a Latin and French academic and was secretly writing short stories.

When she turned forty, the dots finally connected. Being a chemist perfects her cooking, she uses French and Latin daily to find inspiration in old recipes and years of writing make her cookbooks pleasurable to read. I admired the beauty of her dot connecting process and had a vision of myself going through the same process one day.

Twenty years later, here I am. Taking two years to review, research and investigate- in and through film- who I am as a maker and as a person. Now it's me hoping to connect the dots: the child waking up with a strong fear that "they are all dead"; the young critical, angry and passionate me that is taking photos, the sixteen years old making films and political pamphlets, chaining herself to the first McDonalds in Israel, on the grand opening day to get arrested; the frustrated graphic designer; the VJ that is fascinated with the way mass media uses and misuses beauty and the female body, the volunteer in elderly homes, the literature scholar that is investigating freedom within the existing apparatus, and last but not least the doodling school girl that wants to make her environment a better place.

(preface to my blog's Master)

And here I am now, twenty moons after I wrote the paragraph above. As this critical review is the last for the Master's trajectory, I want to critically overview the different layers of the process I went through, my findings and conclusions, as well as sketching the next steps I'll be taking after rounding off this trajectory.

During the past two years, I indeed went through the process of connecting my dots. It started with my intention: creating a new sustainable artistic practice. Three years prior to entering the Master program, I retired from VJing after almost two decades. Somehow, I didn't seem to know how to authentically operate in the daylight, within the dominated framework of cinema. I also wasn't sure how I can merge, what at the time seemed like very different practices. A VJ by night, a serial scholar by day (I have three Master's degrees), a volunteer at elderly homes, unhappy graphic designer and an experimental moving images editor without film festival ambitions. It was, and still is, a core necessity to find a way to grant me a frame to work in and the necessary working conditions.

When my aim was clear, I created change on a physical level turning my intention into daily habits and actions. These new routines gave inner space to research, exploration and experimentation. I will be writing about my new habits and practices in chapter seven. The new practice led me to co-creation with others. I consciously contemplated what it means to take part in a small community of the Master's program, a process I will elaborate on in chapter seven. The making itself was deeply changed by my new environment and behaviour. The next step was the dialogue with the material and re-encountering the world when exposing my work. My way of engaging with the spectator completely changed during the Master, I'll elaborate on that in the last three chapters.