No one asked me to come malkit shoshan by UNMANNED

Ein Hod Israel 2013

radical domesticities

NO ONE ASKED ME TO COME MALKIT SHOSHAN ON THE HOME OF GERTRUD KRAUS

The interior of the ground floor is wide, tall, and relatively bright, thanks to a series of pointed arches that span the flowing space. The ground floor contained the collective areas of Hassan’s house: a liwan or covered hall, a living room, a kitchen, and an indoor staircase that led to the bedrooms on the floor above; an additional staircase was placed outside the house. The openings and windows on the ground floor look to the gardens, while smaller windows in the bedrooms protect the interior from the heat outside. The walls hosted a series of niches providing shelving, storage space, ovens, and benches, and the tones of the structure were oﬀset by colorful embroidered textiles, curtains, and carpets.

Hassan was living with his family in the center of the old Palestinian village of Ein Hawd, at the foot of Mount Carmel. Like the avant-garde artists of Monte Verità, he and his family survived by cultivating their land. From the earth they obtained food, medicine, and stones to build homes. However, unlike the European artists, hopeless farmers, who almost starved to death and eventually decided to leave their endeavor behind, Hassan was a skilled farmer and his fields were fertile. In 1922, according to a survey by the British Mandate authorities, from a total of 12,000 dunams (1,200 hectares) of Ein Hawd land, 1,350 were allocated to the production of wheat, 560 for fodder, 45 for lentils, 30 for subsistence produce, 18 for onions, and 10 for vetch. They also had about 150 olive trees. Hassan, along with the other villagers, was also an excellent builder and mason; his home still stands. It is a typical Arab house, similar in structure to others in the region. Its two-story arched structure forms lofty spaces, enclosing a well and an inner garden, with two exterior gardens in front and in the back. Together with the surrounding homes, the house delineates the old village center. A street-facing masonry wall marks the distinctive entrance to the house, leading to a welcoming garden that could host the family and guests. Part of the garden was adapted to house domestic animals. It provided shade, edible fruits, and water.

Old Ein Hawd, before 1948

Hassan Husain is an internally displaced person. His home, near Haifa, was caught up in a revival of the avant-garde movements of 1910s Switzerland, where the nudist commune of Monte Verità was home to Carl Jung, Rudolf Steiner, and dance artist Rudolf von Laban. Their legacy inspired artists’ communities around the world, inhabited by socially prominent and privileged individuals who could aﬀord to live an alternative lifestyle.

In 1948, during Israel’s War of Independence, Hassan Husain’s home was confiscated by the Israeli army. He and his family were forced to empty the village and leave it behind. Tormented by the loss of their home and properties, Hassan and his family found refuge in the mountain. They remained in the vicinity of their former home, on the same land that once sustained them. Hassan’s family’s first migration was to a nearby prehistoric cave; the mountain continued to shelter them. Meanwhile, the newly established Israeli government treated Ein Hawd as an outlet for a succession of diﬀerent functions. First used by the army as a training ground for combat in a dense urban environment, the government later attempted to populate the empty village with Jewish immigrants from Tunis, but they soon left, claiming it was haunted by demons. Finally, the stone houses temporarily sheltered a group of Orthodox Jews, displaced from newly declared Jordanian territory, as they waited for the concrete structures of their new kibbutz to be completed. Eventually, like the Tunisian immigrants, they, too, left.

malkit shoshan

radical domesticities

Gertrud Kraus and Marcel Janco started inhabiting Ein Hawd in the only way they knew: they treated the village as a found object. Immersed in the overpowering Palestinian scenery, walls, gardens, smells, and remains, the artists indulged in the vernacular landscape. They continued to narrate it, rewrite its origins, and occupy it. They attempted to connect to the landscape, and in the process invented a new identity for themselves, the village, and the new country. The village was renamed Ein Hod, a phonemic simplification that also happened to sound more Hebrew. As genuine pioneers of Dada and modern dance, they felt

After persuading the government to give him the village, Janco invited his artist friends to join him. Hassan’s house was given to one of the first arrivals, Gertrud Kraus, by then a famous modern dancer and choreographer, as well as the assistant to Rudolf van Laban. Like Janco, she had also left Europe for Palestine. Later, she would become one of the pioneers of Israeli modern dance, receiving the first Israel Prize for dance in 1968.

free to disregard history. They naïvely and desperately desired a new world with an edited historical sequence, ignoring the past or present existence of Hassan or any other Palestinian in the area. As Janco said, “In my opinion, Ein Hod is a Dadaist act.” 1 Gertrud’s dance was about the new world, but she couldn’t leave behind her feeling of foreignness. Her desire for belonging was present in early performances in Europe. One of her first choreographed solo dances was called The Strange Guest. She envisioned a diabolic nomad, a mysterious violinist played by Gertrud herself. The adage that accompanied this work was “No one asked me to come, but here I am.” She performed the dance in Israel, but it was perceived as a very strange statement. Gertrude desperately tried to detach herself from the burden of her unbearable past and the wars of Europe. In Palestine, she created new, lighter dances inspired by Laban. She tried to merge with the new climate, to let it form her. As in Rudolf’s dance philosophy, she tried to step out of the civilized environment; she left the indoors and danced outside in nature. She wore airy garments that camouflaged her skin and her body movements within the local scenery.

Gertrud Kraus

The beginning of Ein Hod; Marcel Janco in Ein Hod

However, the village did not remain empty for long. On a sunny day in the early 1950s, the Romanian-born artist and architect Marcel Janco was touring Mount Carmel when he discovered Ein Hawd. Janco, one of the initiators of Cabaret Voltaire and the Dada movement in Zurich, had fled the burgeoning Nazism of 1930s Europe for Palestine. After the establishment of Israel, he helped the governmental planning authority to map the country’s potential national parks. The discovery of the old Palestinian village inspired Janco to turn it into an artists’ colony, similar to the one at Monte Verità.

1 “Marcel Janco: 50% Dadaist,” YouTube video, 3'07”, posted by “zeno v,” April 8, 2008, youtu.be/ QDcbWTOMFdE

malkit shoshan

radical domesticities

il rights. They had no formal address. The houses were not built in the dense clusters characteristic of Arab villages, providing shaded space and social proximity, but scattered far apart on the hilltop, the better to be guarded. They were built out of urgency, rather than carefully cultivated over the years like their former homes. Until the 1980s, each family lived in a three-by-four meter concrete cube. The cubical room functioned as a living room during the day and as a bedroom during the night. It had no road leading to it. It was not connected to water, electricity, or sewage. It was bare, as Hassan and his family had no time for decoration, having to deal with poverty and the daily obstacles mounted by the Israeli authorities. After Gertrud’s death in the late 1970s, all of her belongings were donated to the village of Ein Hod. Hassan’s house is dedicated to the preservation of Gertrud’s legacy and spirit. The white hollow

of plaster and white paint remove Hassan’s labor, but it also made the interior function as a white cube that could absorb new histories, ideas, and narratives. This blank framework allowed for found objects, the jewelry and ceramics hastily buried in 1948 by fleeing Palestinians and later dug up by the resident artists, to be recontextualized as ancestral artifacts linking to a biblical past. Gertrude used Hassan’s kitchen as a living room. Its original function was removed, the two baking ovens in a niche along the wall cleaned up. They became part of the artistic decor, containers for small porcelain vases and kettles. On the walls, framed drawings were hung. The Arab house was thus turned into an eclectic wonder, a collection of objects, ideas, and lifestyles. Its original identity was overwritten.

interior functions as a gallery, a stage hosting cultural events such as jazz and theater performances, opera concerts, family gatherings, and even birthday parties. Hassan was never allowed to return or claim back his property, even though he lives only one kilometer away.

Gertrud’s home today

Gertrud Kraus in what used to be Hassan’s kitchen

Inside Hassan’s house, the detachment from history is also apparent. The war had left it deserted and damaged, with an incomplete ceiling and holes in the walls. Concrete blocks were used to patch up the missing parts. Gertrud painted all of Hassan’s walls white. The stone arches now appear as separate objects, detached from their own history and functionality—a paraphernalia without essence. Not only did the thin layer

Hassan and his family founded a new village near their former home. They named the new village Ein Hawd, just like the old one. The new village was not recognized by the State of Israel until 2004. Palestinian villagers, including Hassan, lived with no civ-

Guilbert, Laure. Danser Avec le IIIe Reich: Les Danseurs Modernes et le Nazisme. Waterloo: André Versaille, 2011. Manor, Giora. The Life and Dance of Gertrud Kraus. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad House, 1978. Slyomovics, Susan. The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Shoshan, Malkit, and Maurizio Bortolotti. Village. Bologna: Damiani, 2014. Van Koningsveld, Sara R. “Eﬀort and Personality According to Rudolf Laban: An Artistic Inquiry of Mobile State.” Master’s thesis, Columbia College Chicago, 2011, digitalcommons.colum. edu/ theses_dmt/1.