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Politics, like sport, uses colours as a marketing tool to identify supporters of various teams and to convey clear messages; “Kill the greens, glory to the blues”. The idea is as old as man and has been heard centuries over often staining the soil red with blood. The Holy Land has seen enough territorial competition to be saturated by both colours and ideologies. As the clans and sides compete, colourful flags and ribbons overwhelm differences in skin tone. From number plates to identity cards, colours of every shade are also used to define people. Besides definition by colour, the State’s provision of decent public services varies among the various communities. Too few rainbow coloured banners float for peace… Until mid-2007, when flying out of Israel, airport stickers put on passports and luggages used a colour coding to indicate the relative level of threat posed by individuals, be they natives or visitors, to the security of the State of Israel. The attribution of colours to passengers by young agents at Ben Gourion Airport obeyed to criteria considered confidential, and was largely reliant on their subjectivity and sensitivity to attitudes, accents and obvious physical origins. This colour system was recently replaced with one using numbers, from 1 to 5, indicated on similar white stickers, although their attribution seem to match comparable profiling criteria. This project deliberately focuses on urban landscapes and tries to demonstrate differences in the provision of public utilities. The staged reference to the “security” airport stickers adds the layer of my own subjective reading, which can be as partial and prejudicial as that of airport security agents. |
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