The Latest at Goethe

For the children in Israeli-Arab Umm el-Fahm, the border fence to the West Bank is part of everyday life. They are too young to remember life without the fence. Yet for the Goethe-Institut’s The Wall in the World project, they now approached the barrier with art.

“I hope that the children will gather many impressions from this visit to the fence. And I hope that they will implement these impressions in their paintings when we return to the gallery,” says Said Abu Shakra, director of the Umm el-Fahm Art Gallery. At the border fence he tells the kids what life was like without a fence. The barrier is to be their theme when they later paint the bricks of the Goethe-Institut’s The Wall in the World.



Some of the children paint cacti on their bricks. In Palestine, they are natural barriers that were once used to fence off the villages. Separation from the neighbours appears so normal to the kids, but it is not natural. In Umm el-Fahm, the urban centre of chiefly Arab Wadi Ara with approximately 50,000 inhabitants, relations with the people in the West Bank were always good. Since construction of the border fence in 2002, that has changed. It cuts the city’s population off from their friends and relatives.

The Goethe-Institut is sending 20 wall “bricks” from Berlin to regions and towns of the world where separation and borders still tangibly affect the lives of people. They serve as the canvas for artists, intellectuals and young people, where they can express their experiences with the walls that mark their everyday lives in Ramallah, Sana’a, Seoul, Nicosia, Beijing, Mexico City and now in Umm el-Fahm.

The bricks will be displayed as part of the exhibition Restrictions of Freedom of Movement from 20 June on the roof of the Umm el-Fahm Art Gallery. In October they will travel back to Berlin, where they will be presented by the Goethe-Institut. As part of the large-scale production at the Festival of Freedom on 9 November at Brandenburg Gate, they will symbolically topple as part of a domino campaign.