Open Closed Open Lesson

Studio 13 at the Art Cube Artists’ Studios, 26 Ha’Oman Street, 3rd floor, Jerusalem | Performance duration: one hour

11:00 – Class for adults ages 18-120

13:00 – Class for children ages 9-18 (without parents)

The structure of a classroom lesson is genetically identical to the structure of a life.

It has a duration, a body, a purpose, an opening, and a closing.

Echoing the words of the poet Yehuda Amichai,

before the lesson, when no one is there yet – the classroom door is open.

When everyone enters and the lesson begins – the door closes.

And when the lesson ends and everyone leaves – the door opens again.

In a new performance piece created specifically for the festival, the classroom will become the ground on which a live lesson takes place. Reut Asimini invites the audience to enter into a personal and group space through the act of drawing.

Asimini is an artist working in the field of drawing and teaches art in high schools and centers for gifted students. In recent years, the boundaries between her artistic practice and her educational work have become increasingly blurred. Asimini draws inspiration from the classroom and the human interaction within it, transforming teaching itself into an artistic medium. At the same time, she brings the language of art into the field of education.

In the work “Open Closed Open Lesson,” Asimini explicitly connects for the first time between these two worlds — the classroom and the studio, teaching and creating art.

The lesson will unfold as an act of listening, marking, and blurring. The lines – those that are drawn and those that are erased – become tools through which relationships are examined: between body and space, between belonging and movement, between the individual and the group, between us and the state. This is a living and sincere exploration of structures – mental, political, visual – and of the way they are recorded and etched into the notebook of our lives, as it opens, closes, and then remains open.