(The interview was originally published on Ymag, where you can still read it. Images courtesy of Tom Tlalim, unless specified otherwise.)

In occasion of The Smooth and The Striated, a Gilles Deleuze-inspired art exhibition which took place at the Nieuwe Dakota and Huize Frankendael venues in Amsterdam, I had the chance to meet Israeli artist Tom Tlalim. Tlalim has been living in the Netherlands for a decade now, and recently he has been in the new business district of De Zuidas in South Amsterdam for a five months residency at the Virtueel Museum Zuidas. The works he exhibited dealt with contemporary themes of conflict, politics, war, finance, and urbanization, while maintaining simple yet technologically-layered aesthetics. The long interview that follows (and which will be published in three parts) covers a variety of issues, ranging from the intersections of art and science to public ground privatization, from the contemporary role of the artist to the Palestine/Israel conflict. All with the urban landscape of the developing business district of De Zuidas as a background.

De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

Nicola: First of all, before being an installation artist or a video-maker, you are a musician. While visiting the Zuidas myself, I noticed the landscape is quite desolated and dispersed and, apart from a few bars – for example near the metro stop, next to the Accenture building – the area is very quiet. How did the sound of the Zuidas inspire you?

Tom: It’s interesting that you indicate the location of the bars by their proximity to a multinational company building. This happens a lot at the Zuidas. For me it was essential to keep a critical view of the place in my work, and not to use readymades such as brand names or PR materials. I wanted to experience this environment for what it is and let my opinion on it form gradually. In such a politically charged environment, the info, news and views, however impartial they may seem, often do tend to reaffirm the brand by placing it on the map.

As a composer, I am not only interested in sound, but also in structure. Musical structure can be described as the designed transformation of sound material over time. It is essentially temporal. In this way it resembles architecture and the manner in which a designed space transforms as it exposes itself to the visitor temporally. The correlation between the two creative arts becomes even clearer through acoustics, as the movement of the visitor through different acoustical spaces becomes a sonic transformation.

A bar next to the metro stop in De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

The aurality of the Zuidas is very static and unspecific. Just like many other new business districts popping up around the world, it does not seem to have been designed with dynamic acoustics in mind. There’s that motorway hum, jet plane whistles, construction and drilling noises, central air conditioning buzz, train track squeals, commuters footsteps rushing with trollies etc. Altogether they make a familiar urban drone, or perhaps – a loud silence. But this drone is masked by the wild oceanic winds and rain of The Netherlands (There are many raging wind tunnels as well. One story I’d heard is that they had trees planted in the small square outside the train station in the attempt to stop the raging winds). The sounds of music in some restaurants and bars could have offered some more exciting sonic buzz, but these generally tend to play music off computer playlists, with popular 80′s hits being the current trend with the workers of the multinational companies. So this bit of the sonic dimension had been reduced again to a numb automation.

To collect information on the place and get a feel for it, I used a research method where I would walk around in a kind of Dérive, using a recording device with sealed headphones as a sonic travel guide. It’s like walking with a prosthetic ear, which amplifies all the small sounds around. Eventually I did manage to find a couple of nice sonic moments. For example, a huge sewage pump splattering sewage from one puddle to another. The combination of the fluid suction and splashing and the smell was quite dramatic. But overall, the lack of real dynamics in the acoustic environment made me drift ever more towards a large park right next to my studio, and take longer trips through the neighborhoods around. These drifts emphasized the limitations of walking freely in a completely designed environment, which became also the topic of the essay The New Model City (Intimate Stories on Absence, Onomatopee#41, ISBN 978-90-78454-40-3), and of Walking Through Walls.

A reflecting skyscraper in De Zuidas. Photo by Nicola Bozzi

Nicola: Fredric Jameson mentioned reflecting surfaces as an element of postmodern architecture. I noticed that you used mirrors or reflective surfaces in your previous works. At the Huize Frankendael, where your video was shown, there was also a mirror in front of the projection. Was it your choice to screen the video there? How do you incorporate them in your aesthetic?

Tom: The mirror is the main reason why I chose that room. The Hiuze Frankendael was built in the 17th century by the Dike and Shipping official Nicolaas van Liebergen, who was also served a term as the director of Curaçao Island – a central shipping point for the Atlantic slave trade. So the structure of the villa embodies the social hierarchy of the time. I think that mirror functioned as a way for the personnel to check out what is happening in the room from the corridor, without disturbing by entering it. But the specific shape of the mirror also resembles the video material I shot of the Zuidas. I was filming the urban landscape through consecutive rectangular holes in the train station pillars, moving the camera to the Left and Right. This motion is typical of aiming to shoot or for orientation, but repetitive like a clock pendulum or the lulling of a ship. The mirror added a voyeuristic dimension to the video, where I flirt with the idea of transparency all the time. So when visitors entered the exhibition space, they would first see the video through the mirror – cropped, inverted and distorted. And only upon entering the room would they turn around and see the real projection.

Exhibition view at Huize Frankendael. Photo courtesy of Tom Tlalim

Mirrors and reflections are fascinating as a tool of power. They provide a copy of reality which is necessary to prove our existence to ourselves. But it is only a reflection. Leibniz said that the soul is the mirror of the universe. In his theory of monads, he includes a depiction of a windowless universe of mirrors, each reflecting the other one to infinity. I used a similar image in The New Model City, transferring this image to the context of new urbanity (also inspired by Sharon Rotbard’s beautiful book White City Black City):

“When high-rises are built next to one another, each glass facade mirrors the other one, as they feed their mutual identity back into infinity. But this image has no content. At this point the medium becomes the message. And currency, which traditionally reflects a value, begins to reflect potential – the value of potential growth.” – T. Tlalim, The New Model City

Nicola: In your video, you compare the experience of the Zuidas, where it’s impossible to wander outside the overly-planned street grid, with the opposite practice of “walking through walls”. This practice was mentioned in a famous article by Israeli architect and critic Eyal Weizman, explaining the influence of French post-structuralist thought on how the Israeli military conducted urban warfare in Nablus in 2002.What are the spatial dialectics connecting a strongly constrained walk – the Zuidas – with the omniscient look of the israeli military, which penetrates walls?

Tom: The design and technology of the two different spaces represent two opposite approaches; The Zuidas is planned top-to-bottom in a short time period, while the palestinian village Lifta has a rhizomatic, non-hierarchical expansion pattern, where houses are cascaded on the side of a mountain, and have expanded gradually over generations, as families grew larger. The two represent a distinctly different social pattern.

The relation I wanted to show, between the Zuidas and Lifta, has to do with this opposition, and with the fact that both are cities under occupation. One – military – and the other – financial. The world of finance has traditionally drawn influence from the military, and building a business district is a kind of campaign for occupation of local grounds by a group of multinational companies. The Zuidas – an initiative of the ABN AMRO group – operates within the city of Amsterdam, to create a local space for multinational companies and their workers.

Tom Tlalim, Walking Through Walls (2010). Still frame from video courtesy of the artist.

There are hardly hard fences, mainly glass, mirrors, and what I call soft borders i.e. symbols that are known to be borders, such as an open gate, or a statue of a dog or a lion guarding the gate. So the walls that I was dreaming of walking through are not the walls imposed on me by someone, but rather the soft mental walls I put around myself, being familiar with the social code. These walls in one’s mind are the toughest to walk through. And it is no wonder that when one does, as the soldiers had to in Balata, one loses a sense of one’s own personal security. If this can happen to these people, it can happen to anyone.

The idea to superimpose the business district with the blown-off walls of Lifta came from reading Weizman’s article Walking Through Walls, and a chapter in Sharon Rotbard’s book White City Black City, which tells about a number of historical occasions when this technique was re-invented and reused, including at Manshiya – a neigborhood of Jaffa that was completely erased by the Etsel in 1947. It felt like the financial interests behind such new urbanity projects are often as blunt as armies in the change that they bring into the local environment, but this brutal force is concealed in slow processes.

Tom Tlalim, Walking Through Walls (2010). Still frame from video courtesy of the artist.

I decided to call the video Walking Through Walls after Weizman’s piece, because the title suggests a duality. On the one hand it symbolizes a romantic human urge to be liberated from physical and social confinements, and a desire to return to the wild, nomadic or pagan life. On the other hand, it is an army tactic. The forced penetration of residential walls by an invading army. In this process, while the locals lose their homes, privacy, security and identity, the invaders lose their moral upper hand.

(Read the second and the third part of the interview.)