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Ramallah is a political centre in the West Bank only a few kilometres from Jerusalem. It is separated from Israel by an insurmountable wall. Thirty students in Ramallah have now described their experiences of lives behind walls on stones sent by the Goethe-Institut.


"The wall separates us from our families, from our neighbours, from our friends," says the student Rana, "from everything that we love." Rana is one of approximately 30 students who designed the six bricks of the wall that the Goethe-Institut sent to Ramallah. The students were asked to use art to relate the bricks from Germany to their own wall.

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Over half of the people in the West Bank are under the age of 18. That is why the Goethe-Institut decided to work with young people at this stop on the journey of The Wall in the World. What do they have to say about walls? What have they experienced? The results produced by the six groups are quite different from one another, ranging from cartoons to a Mondrian-style olive tree.

With the symbolic journey the Goethe-Institut hopes to encourage dialogue across borders arising from current constellations of conflict. Artists will express their experiences with borders on the "wall bricks" as the international part of the planned domino campaign of the Berlin Senate for the Fest der Freiheit (Festival of Freedom) on 9 November at Brandenburg Gate.

For this purpose, 20 bricks were sent around the world from Berlin. The "bricks" are 2.50 x 1.00 x 0.40 metres in size, made of Styrofoam and therefore weigh approximately a mere 20 kg. To make them paintable, they were covered with a sturdy textile. In addition to Ramallah, bricks were sent to Sana'a, Umm el-Fahm, Seoul, Beijing, Mexico City and Nicosia – places where separation and borders are everyday things.

On 6 July the six Palestinian bricks will be exhibited on the campus of Bir Zeit University and from 12 until 19 July 2009 at the German-French Culture Centre. Later, a jury will determine which will be sent back to Germany and the other half will remain in Ramallah.

"We want this wall to fall," Rana says, "just like the wall in Berlin fell."