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Dr Joanne Brueton in conversation with film-maker Amos Gitai on his latest play, House (2023)
In her recent article and interview with Amos Gitai, 'House: "A peaceful little object"' (2023), Joanne Brueton examines the violent logics of home and homelands in an Israel-Palestinian context that is intensifying drastically. Gitai’s stage becomes a space of multidirectional memory, where echo, sedimentation, and a fragile call to hospitality puts Jewish and Palestinian voices in dialogue.
When the Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad invited Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai to stage his documentary trilogy House (1980, 1998, 2005) at the Théâtre national de la Colline in 2023, geopolitical animosities made way for artistic solidarities.
In this article and interview, Dr Brueton explores how Gitai’s play critiques the violent logics of home and homelands, exploring how a commandeered house in West Jerusalem plays host to the multidirectional memory of violent Jewish and Palestinian erasure. Stones become metonyms of the Israel-Palestine conflict: as they are quarried, chiselled, split, cemented, and erected, they testify to the construction of homes that also become tools of destruction, expulsion, and mutual ontological violence (Kotef, 2020).
Drawing on an interview Dr Brueton conducted with Gitai in July 2023, and his Collège de France lectures from 2018 to 2019, she reads his archaeological journey into the remains of this Arab-Jewish house as a call to hospitality (Derrida, 1997): troubling the subject positions of host and hostage that both underpin and impede a ‘chez soi’.
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This page was last updated on 19 January 2024
