Arnold

“Last summer, the museum opened to the general public. After years of planning, followed by many years of construction, the building – a heavy, white, angular origami-like mass – stood as a construction site that seemed eternal. The project’s developers released several images of the building online, glowing in a warm yellow-orange light at dusk.

 

The Shamouti orange was first created as a mutation in the orchard of an Arab farmer from Jaffa. Not long after, this very mutation began to be marketed by the State of Israel as a national brand under the name ‘Jaffa Oranges’. On October 7, 1964, the detention center in Jerusalem was purchased from the Soviet Union as part of the Orange Deal. The young State of Israel lacked the funds to pay for the ruined buildings on its land, and so it offered an immense sum in citrus fruit instead. Seventeen years earlier, in that very same detention center – then under British control – two Irgun fighters, Moshe Barazani and Meir Feinstein, committed suicide in a final embrace after a failed attempt to attack the British. They did so using a grenade smuggled into the prison inside an orange peel.”

 

At the core of the exhibition lies a planning action: identifying the structural stress points in the museum’s engineering scheme and placing oranges on them. The building – with its physical and economic characteristics, and its relationship to its surroundings and the ground – becomes a departure and gathering point for a narrative that stretches outward to California, golf courses, Italian cladding stones, but also folds inward, moving backward into the story of Moshe Barazani, Meir Feinstein, and the Shamouti orange. Using architectural tools, computer-generated drawings, video, and documentation of interventions in public or open spaces, the work creates connections between the symbolic and the concrete. It explores the way power spreads through space and how sabotage might serve as a meeting point between histories in Jerusalem.