Garden State

Gardens are micro-landscapes and gardening, like mapping, is a way of allocating territory. Over two years, Corinne Silva travelled across twenty-two Israeli settlements making photographs of public and private gardens, in order to explore the ways in which gardens and gardening may represent the Israeli State’s ongoing expansionist ambitions. Garden State (first shown as Gardening the Suburbs) takes the form of a large-scale installation made up of clusters of photographs of these Israeli gardens. 

The Israeli State was formed in 1948, in a war that saw hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages destroyed and depopulated. It is referred to and remembered as al-Nakba or ‘the catastrophe’ by Palestinians. Subsequently the Israeli State began ‘New Towning’, in an aim to move Israelis beyond the urban centre of Tel Aviv into land from which the Palestinian population had been displaced, and to create Israeli communities with their own industry. Composed of clusters of photographs, Silva’s wall installation loosely maps these suburban gardens as they extend from the coastal areas surrounding Tel Aviv, across the Green Line and into the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as they cover over Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948, and cut off Palestinian communities in the West Bank from each other.