The soil is yellow.
Even before you see it, driving over the crumbling concrete, the air fills with a faint cloud of sulfur. The mining sites are abandoned; they resemble a lunar landscape here at the end of the world (or perhaps at its naval). The mining plant looms like a skeleton. Only its foundations and columns remain, held by a towering concrete ceiling while gaping holes have collapsed between them. The building stands like the massive remains of a prehistoric fish, devoid of the sea to which it once belonged. Native plants grow wild. Beside the factory is a deep, lined well, now fenced off. Many stories were tied to this well, and the fence built to keep people away is often torn down. It’s hard to keep people away from the call of earth’s depths, the dark, underground spaces. Small plants sprout from the well’s sides, and it’s bottom is very dark.
‘If each day falls
inside each night,
there exists a well
where clarity is imprisoned.
We need to sit on the rim
of the well of darkness
and fish for fallen light
with patience.’
-Pablo Neruda. From “The Sea and the Bells.” Translated by William O’Daly, 1988
Graffiti in Arabic adorns the broken walls, and late in the evening, when the western wind blows and shadows stretch long, the muezzin’s call carries clearly from Gaza. The quarries and the sulfur plant were operated by an Anglo-Arab company from the early 1930s until the middle of World War II. Concrete roads interconnected the factory to the surrounding areas, and the land purchased in 1944 became the foundation for Kibbutz Be’eri. History has positioned it as the center of energetic movement, connecting man to the depths of the earth and to what’s above it.
**
What is mysterious sulfur doing in the Kurkar soil of the western Negev? Assumingly, it is a result of tectonic activity that combines materials from earth’s depths with those above it. Sulfur, formed this way, connects primal lower worlds with worldly light. An ancient allegorical material, it is an essential mineral for all living things, drawn from the soil by plants. An ancestral substance known from ancient times, which alchemy through its mystical writing, described as a core element of the philosopher’s stone. Motivating restoration, healing the sickness and imperfection of all substances, the universal healing of nature. Sulfur is a potential. Just as it is created by deep shadow and air, it can both heal and destroy.
We used to drive there in a different time. Now, the area west of Be’eri is a military exclusion zone. But even when we could travel there, the abandoned factory and mines were always mythical. Abandoned things tend to fill with invisible creatures, as if their story continues on a different timeline, a thin barrier dividing what might have been from what came to pass. In the gallery, buildings’ remnants are gnawed and corroded, as ancient archeology. When the corroded buildings are enlarged, printing rosettes become visible. These treated buildings are based on Berlin architecture magazines printed in the 1950s, demonstrating the city’s reconstruction after World War II.
**
Very far from here at the northern edge of the earth, in the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, a seed vault is buried inside the mountainside of an abandoned coal mine. Why are we humans always searching for the earth’s secrets, as if our own are hidden with them? Inside the vault, millions of seed samples are frozen for preservation throughout a millennium, to safeguard the gene pool of food plants in case of extinction. The vault is situated on stable permafrost, with no recorded tectonic activity. The existence of this safe feels mythical – it is hard to believe we created such a place that harnesses underground forces, to safeguard the promise of life.
The cold North was brought to the gallery as shards of Nuummite. This substituted rock underwent a metamorphosis and was formed under extreme environmental changes. Discovered in Greenland and estimated to be 2800 million years old, it is one of the oldest ever identified. This rock has witnessed most of our planet’s history. Its deep, dark black color is reminiscent of stormy skies and deep water, concealing sparks capable of illuminating the darkness.
**
Ayelet Hashahar Cohen’s journey spans two eras. She assembles an underground mycelium between earth regions, between two women. Trough the history of wars and life that followes, from a sulfur mine in one part of the world to a coal mine in another, through man-made concrete veins beneath dark soil and underground vegetation, flows a powerful desire to bring clarity into the darkness. This concrete everywhere, with its alien crudeness, can only befit a time when organic softness seems too vulnerable against the realization of the destructive potential of the forces at our disposal.
And yet, the artist collects seeds: Seeds Inside the vault, seeds inside the book, seeds with operating instructions whose time will come, even if it is difficult to feel when it will arrive. What is placed here if not faith in one frozen seed’s ability to awaken from its deep, dark slumber, through volcanic power, through the power of the rocks’ endurance in time, through the force of imagination, through the power of the heart’s desire, through the power of a journey first made in a shamanic world of passage, and continues with one’s feet.
The exhibition envelopes the “Herbarius”. Born with a primordial belief in the earth and its movement – its ability to extract materials of life of itself, even if they cannot be seen with our eyes but only with our heart, by recruiting vision in the underground darkness to locate sources of light, molten into old rocks. It carries instructions for life, knowledge from an ancient, unknowing world, protected beneath the soil. Waiting for a day when life will reawaken and sulfur’s inner heat, the fire of nature, will ignite. When nature disappears into quiet coldness, it’s hard to remember if there ever was anything else. In a cold, abandoned world, she sows the possibility of repair, healing, a memory of entire eras folded into a tiny seed, at the bottom of the deepest well.
