Mehdi Amel - The Colonial Mode of Production

• 2024
• 14min

Overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, Ein Houd’s landscape of carob trees, grapes, olives, arches and domes, ruins and artefacts–– continues to intrigue. What kind of art can be made on fresh ruin completely void of narratives and whole worlds that lived a few years prior? Erasure, omission, extraction, alienation are normal to art–– to transform the evident and the seen into the partly unrecognizable is arts decoy too. The photographs used in the film are extracted from Zvi Efrat’s Object of Zionism: The Architecture of Israel which were intentionally presented to Toukan by the Qattan Foundation without any context or captions or information. As such, Focus puller studies various levels of ‘abstracting’ and ‘pure thought’, oscillating between the bad-faith and good-faith of abstraction. In cinema a ‘focus puller’ is responsible for keeping the subject of a camera in focus, so as to direct and redirect a viewer’s focus while the subject or the camera begins to change positions.