Sea Level (2013)

Sea level refers to the average height of the surface of the ocean. The Dead Sea is far below sea level—about -430 meters (-1,411 feet) below the Mediterranean sea level. Its water level has significantly reduced over time due to mineral extraction, climate and water diversion.

Using photography, performance, digital processing, and sculpture, this work explores sea level as a cartographic physical measure, a metaphor, and a material, and how it can register movement, loss, and the experience of un-translation—the poetic that emerges from the impossibility of translation.

Taking inspiration from the poem "Once A Great Love" by Yehuda Amichai that is read as a kind of ecopoetic elegy, on the loss of a place that was once deeply loved, held, and known—not just metaphorically, but sensorially, bodily. A love letter to a vanishing body of water, a lament for ecological loss, and how landscapes—like lovers—can live within us long after they recede from the visible world.

""sea level" then becomes both cartography, human geography and a metaphysical measurement — as a poetic metaphor for loss, memory, love, absence and invisible presence.This project begins with mapping a series of elevation signs marking sea level along the descent through the Judean Desert and from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. I traced and translated these signs into abstract blue forms, which I then digitally superimposed onto a long-exposure performance photographic sequence. The photographic process involved inverting the images into high-contrast black and white, capturing the blur and trace of the body as a way of holding memory. The Blue Lines as translated markers are indexical, abstracted cartographic glyphs that point to a series of physical sea level signs. The blue appears in multiple forms: as a graphic line, as movement through space, and as pigment sealed in jars that contain hand-mixed shades of blue, ranging from deep indigo to pale turquoise. Their shades, glass containers, and placement mark the passage of elevation—the shades of blue in cartographic maps indicating the disappearance of the Dead Sea—but what they really trace is the memory of loss, love, and the descent from sea level into a dying sea.