 I choose to call my book An Archaeology of Fear and Desire because after wrestling for many months with words, sentences, it seemed to me that really that was the title which was making more sense among all others. I thought of the land I will give you to see. I thought about Israel, Teatro Mundi, but ultimately I believe that an archaeology of fear and desire give a sense of a place and a project at the edge where the particular and the universal meet. It's very strange that the Palace Hotel was my very first photograph. I never photographed architecture in my life and in a way it's all the more important because this photograph set the agenda for the entire project. It is for me the key for deciphering the entire body of work and I had read for many years Pessoa who says in his book of Disquietions we are shadows made of lies both hollow in the inside and in the outside and this is really what this photograph is about and this is what all of the images are about and this photograph being put at the beginning of the book before the book even starts is an indication for the reader of how to look at these images. There's obviously a promise which is attached to this land. That's not a coincidence that we call it the promise land. The question is what have we done with this promise? What can we do with this promise? What will we do with this promise? And mainly what will we do with us? To us. Originally in the text in the Bible when God speaks to Abraham the father of three monotheisms God tells Abraham go to the place that I will show you not to the place that I will give you but really to the place that I will show you which indicate the place which will reveal you to yourself and to others. It seems that this promise which is also a promise of redemption because this is what Israel ultimately is about an experiment in redemption it seems that this promise has been betrayed has been ambushed and that people have used the text instrumentalized the text to make it say what they wanted to say and the reality appear in many of these images it seems that people have created their own bubble and have created their own hyper-reality if we look at one of the image which is just behind we see a family in the Judean hills this photograph could have happened almost 2000 years ago but those people seem to take the Bible for a book of geography as I was elaborating my working hypothesis I was really interested in seeing how people are defining others how they are otherizing others and ultimately my project became a project about longing, belonging and exclusion and when people choose belonging over longing they definitely end up excluding and this is the tragedy of ideologies of religions when they are misunderstood because it's always ultimately a betrayal of the humane in the human I conceived of this place as a group project because for me I always looked at Israel as a place of radical otherness a place where every single person is the other of somebody else close and far others an Ethiopian for a Russian, a Moroccan for a German an Arab Christian for an Arab Muslim an Armenian for a Jew a place of radical dishonest and in order to really be able to understand this place I thought I needed others to look at this place of radical otherness I could have never seen like they have seen I could have never shown what they have shown and I believe that this exhibition is so far more than the addition of the parts and it's really about the number of perspectives which appear here are the spectrum of grammars and syntaxes that are being used make the richness of this project I worked previously in Israel in 1988 in 1998 and I thought one day I will take more time to look to look more deeply in the fault lines and I gave myself much more time and I believe I did what I did before but more so I used an 8x10 camera which I have used before but not systematically in order to provide to myself the tools to what I have always done but to do it even better I have always considered myself as a photographer as a midwife for the people that I photograph and they are midwives for me at the same time but I believe that this 8x10 camera enabled me to enter a kind of ritual with the people that I photographed and at the same time I never used color I think I was forced to use color because I couldn't anymore use black and white black and white for a project like that and for Israel would look like passeiste at least with what I had to say and therefore I use color but at the same time when I look back at my work it's very monochromatic the palette is made of small intervals and in a way this is me still being facefull to my 25 years black and white practice I would say that I'm a storyteller and I spend a huge amount of time to listen as well as to observe and I met so many people so many situations, so many stories and then among those stories I needed to find the most paradigmatic to tell the story that encompass a very large spectrum of stories and that ultimately enable the viewer to tell his or her own story