12 Soundings

The Linking Trail Between Words and Landscapes

Works and Words by Moshe Oren                                                                                                  

Photographs by Moshe Oren, Gidi Branz, Shaul Vitis

An eighteen-day journey on foot along the length of Israel, from Tel Dan on the northern border to the Gulf of Eilat in the south, undertaken in the spring of 1993. Our National Trail is not yet born, and no one has ever taken on this kind of journey before, from north to south, from Dan to Eilat.

This kind of endeavor requires a frame story. A story that belongs to a small stone, one that I took from the northernmost point of the Dan River, and carried around my neck the entire length of the country, to its southernmost point (Gulf of Eilat). On the way, that little stone dipped in the Sea of Galilee (Ginosar Beach), the Mediterranean Sea (Nahal Hadera Estuary), and the Red Sea (Eilat Beach), where I let her sink to her final resting place.

And over time, on the trail, Soundings gathered into the story – works and actions created and performed along the way, all an immediate, spontaneous expression of an encounter with a particular place, a particular landscape, and all very much from here, from this land.

It was the early 1990s, and our state was in turmoil. An entire country embroiled in a cycle of bloodshed. And I, from the moment I set out, was searching for my “mark”, my “signature”, something that would accompany me on my journey. And at the very beginning of the walk, on the old patrol road in the Golan Heights, I find it. My personal signature, I thought, will be the Sentinel.

Later, this feeling increasingly grew as I walked along the Green Line. This imaginary, virtual line exuded a sense of threat. Of real and tangible danger. Suddenly, the Sentinel motif – the lone figure standing guard, on the fence, on the wall, on the border – truly belonged here, to this land. And, as I continued southward, I discovered an additional, different, connection between my Sentinel and the Rujum, traditional stone cairns erected along routes and on crossroads, and then between it and the Asharas, the ancient milestones used by desert caravans.

Seven Sentinels sprouted along the trail of my journey. Five of them appear here, in this book.   Thirty-three years later, I find myself wondering if any of them are still standing, looking out.