El Ultimo Cemi

Rachel tells the story of a woman who lived in a place and time where she had to fight for almost R a c h e I everything she wanted. Rachel was born in 1915 to a Jewish Orthodox family in a religiously conserva- KEREN TZUR tive neighborhood of Jerusalem. At that time the British ruled the country (then called Palestine), and World Wide Web women were expected to stay home, help their mothers with housekeeping and the younger children, and, when the time came, get married and bear their own children. They had no freedom to choose 1997 what to do or where to live, and there was no expectation that they would study, have a profession, earn their own living, or think for themselves. Rachel was a girl who dared to follow her desires, saying no to a powerful father, to strong religious obligations, and to society at large. She was a femif ^ f j I^ J I m } 6 rJnist in the terms of her time and place, and she is my grandmother. I grew up listening to her stories about her life, her fights with her father over whether she could go to high school, and her deeds as a member of the Israeli resistance to British rule. In Rachel, I follow my grandmother from her early childhood in Meaa Shearim (the One Hundred Gates neighborhood of Jerusalem) through her time v^^~~ j -r y in the Israeli resistance to her later life as a teacher, mother, and director of children's plays. Side by side with Rachel's stories, I give information about the progress of women's liberation around the world during the same period. El U t I m o C e m i This piece began when I moved from Puerto Rico to the United States. As homesickDAYOAN DAUMONT ness drove me to learn more about my culture and its history, I came upon a story, "La Peregrinaci6n de Urayoan" (The Journey of Urayoan) about the native Indians of Puerto Installation Rico, the Tainos, and their mortal relationship to the Spanish Conquistadors who all but 1997 wiped them out. This story had a double impact on me; first, because my name derived from a Taino chief (or cacique), and second, because it related death to the liberation and freedom of an entire race. The concept of necessary death for the benefit of the many has cropped up in every culture since the dawn of time, and the relationship between necessary and unnecessary death is part of the moral fabric of all cultures. Wars have always been used to justify the death of the many for the proliferation or defense of ideals. Recently, in the Gulf War, we have seen how our ability to hide the carnage makes it easy for society to buy into the high ideals that justify the death of others. In El Ultimo Cemi I try to correlate the idea of necessary death with a more tabloid type of death that springs purely from selfish human passions. The story involves the drowning of a Spaniard, and it symbolizes the fact that death, like life itself, observes no boundaries in the way it affects all of humankind. Life is momentary, a matter of time granting passage to those who survive; only the now is certain. In our awareness of our own . mortality, we must find significance one moment at a time. . In the installation itself, the story is told through a video screen seen through the bottom of a tank of water. In El Ultimo C'emi, visitors change the unfolding story by dipping their hands into the water between them and the video images. Unlike a river, which moves until it is stopped, the installation is static until someone intervenes. And there is no apparent or obvious timeline, so that the story is hidden until the visitor extracts it through persistence and time. Digital Salon, Artists' Statements 401 ...