COW PARK | Guy Dolev

When Guy Dolev heard about the struggle of the Armenian community in Jerusalem over the “Cow Garden” (Gan HaParah), he drove there in his red car and started filming. In the past, cows grazed in Cow Garden, and refugees pitched their tents there. Today, Cow Garden is a protest focal point for the neighborhood residents, who are fighting to keep the place under the control of the Armenian community, and it is also a parking lot. 

Guy opens his studio at the Art Cube Artists’ Studios to the visitors of Manofim Festival, and reveals, in an intimate performance, the collaborative process with the Save the ArQ movement, the activist group leading the struggle. On the boundary between documentary theater and experimental lecture, the Cow Park performance combines interviews and archival materials with video clips filmed over the past two years across the parking lot in the Cow Garden through a car’s backup camera. Through this photographic mechanism, Guy tries to approach the complex politics and history of the neighborhood, while avoiding collision. Whoever and whatever enters this rear field of view is distorted, becomes rounded – the parking markings, the walls of the Old City, an old photograph, and a variety of characters: a retired photographer, the parking lot guard, a computer technician, political activists, refugees, and the audience.

Videography and editing: Guy Dolev and Itamar Skalka

Scenography: Odea Gabbai

Technical coordination: Vartan Hindoyan

Sound design: Roi Becker

Artistic consultancy: Erez Maayan-Shalev, Itai Doron, Thalia Hoffman, Rinat Edelstein

The work includes excerpts from Amnon Rubinstein’s documentary film Armenians in Jerusalem (1979) and “Sassuni Oror,” performed by the singer Hasmik Harutyunyan.

Cow Park was produced with the support of the Pais Council for the Arts and Culture.