"home" both as a conceptual and physical space.
World of Matter : White Gold by Judy Price
White Oil is a 65 minute film by artist Judy Price
There are over 350 quarries in the Occupied Palestinian Territories of the West Bank. The stone excavated has been termed the 'white oil' of Palestine and is the only raw material available to support the Palestinian economy and provides a livelihood for over 20,000 workers. However, of the stone and sand excavated from the quarries 65% is expropriated by Israel for the construction of Israel, and to build the illegal settlements in the West Bank, with Israel also exporting the stone internationally and claiming it as their own product. Today almost every hillside is scarred by the brutal incision of the quarries. Walking through the landscape of the West Bank this mutilation becomes disconcertedly visible to the naked eye. The land is pillaged and defaced, its wound left open to reveal a 'geology of disaster'.
White Oil engages with the interstices of a number of genres; photography, documentary, the cinematic, fiction and testimony, with ethnographic methodologies playing an important role to address the way the quarries in the West Bank are not just industrial spaces in which labour and excavation of raw material take place, but lived spaces. White Oil unfolds narratives around colonialism, expropriation of land and mobility through the day-to-day lives of the quarry owners, workers and security guards. This includes their personal histories and experiences as well as the changing landscape and conditions of the quarries bringing to bear the myriad losses of land, economy, identity, history and community.
Filmed in a number of locations in the West Bank images are highly composed and imbued in the language of the static frame, the durational image and the aesthetics of delay to reveal the military, religious and geopolitical forces that pervade this land. Throughout the film dialogue (with subtitles) are interwoven. Importantly, the participants are engaged actively in the filmmaking process with a collaborative mode of address and with the film considering the role of the artist as filmmaker, activist and ethnographer
The film is structured around the interplay between day and night. The day scenes focus on the decimation of the landscape: the machines and non-human elements, settlements and landscape, sounds of industry and cutting of the stone. The night scenes, by contrast, are more narrative and intimate, focusing on the social gathering of the Birzeit Brothers and their friends and their engagement with the quarry space. In these night scenes the quarry becomes a dwelling with moments of resistance. Ramzi a security guard appears intermittently throughout the film and provides a narration and consistency.