Broken Spaces and Walled Off Realities

Abstract

This paper proposes a closer view into how space is structured with one single purpose: to exercise power, both in physical and structural, or rather physical–structural form, bending and twisting human behavior around it. Separation walls embody frustration that stems from unresolved traumas of the past that perpetuate the impotence to solve or re-solve these traumas. Individuals living in the shadows of such walls have incorporated the pain of these traumas into their identities, a pain that leads to an external expression of the incorporation that is then directed towards the wall changing its purpose, turning it into a canvas of creative capitulation in front of the power represented by it. The artifacts that start populating and decorating such walls function as a form of aesthetic domestication, shifting impotence into potency, offering a new semiotic field for the definition of the term “aesthetic resistance.” The objects discussed in this paper include the Berlin Wall and the Israeli–Palestinian separation wall (as seen from Netiv HaAsara and Bethlehem). Walls are not specifically defined in this text. They can be metaphorical, and conventional (without material representation), they can be represented by differences that separate people, institutions, and political structures from each other. This text has not been written with the desire to offer a thorough academic introduction into “teichopolitics” (the politics of walls); instead, it provides a phenomenological “description” of a sort of different experiences regarding various ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding walls.