Machines Room

4th Exhibition in the 15th Nidbach Series

The necessity to be seen as an everyman chafes at selfhood.” *

– “Have you seen this Red, what has happened Yotam?”
– “Noa, I don’t sleep much”
(From a conversation with Yotam, November 2008.)

When Yotam started photographing, he used to wait two hours to shoot a landscape, two hours to shoot a lizard. He photographed animals, butterflies, colchicums, reptiles he met, insects he saw. The desire to photograph came from a love of nature.
In the room where he grew up he raised grasshoppers, scorpions, sparrows, turtles, tortoises, more than a few types of snakes, more than a few types of butterflies. He fed porcupines, collected bats nurtured caterpillars, identified butterfly eggs on leaves, moved them from an old leaf to a new one, from an old leaf to a new one. He thought: “I will study Biology, and continue to photograph”.
Now, Yotam lives in a “room-non-room, on the third and a half floor”, sharing a wall with the machine room of the communal elevator, and “the machine is actually always there, beyond the wall”. He photographs body organs inside a room and room organs inside a body.
He grafts animal bones to fingertips, inserts a pipe into a mouth, removes a pipe out through nostrils, places a mouth in a plumbing pipe, tightens a mouth on a vacuum cleaner pipe, glues a butterfly wing to a finger, sticks a finger in paste, threads a hand out of a pair of trousers, sticks a finger in a cactus, bursts fingertips out of a space between door and floor.
Yotam says that the loneliness is essential for his photographs. That what is created and comes from him is purely the result of his being alone in a room, and otherwise it could not be so.
Room and Camera – might evoke the world which lies within the skull. (Noa Sadka)

*David Fogel, journal segment, 25.5.1919. From: David Fogel, “Kol HaShirim” – collected with preface by Dan Pagis, Agudat HaSofrim press, 1966, p. 13 [Hebrew].