The Jewish promise of "a land flowing with milk and honey," and the Christian Eucharist ceremony in which bread and wine stand for Christ's body and blood, are the basis for Chefetz's performance. But the video also features a reading of guidelines for sexual conduct from a 1930's German book, which sound like a series of threats rather than an invitation to pleasure. Chefetz combines war memories with local political realities, creating a multilayered universal parable about the tension between pleasure and pain, sweetness and suffering.
June 2004
Amanita Virosa: Part One in a Trilogy
Amanita Virosa is the world’s most poisonous mushroom, whose seemingly romantic name serves to convey a double meaning: on the one hand, feminine beauty and gentleness in the filmed image of opera singer Cicilla Bertoldi; on the other, images of decay and death. Hefetz engages in a personal-shamanic ritual, with a dense mixture of images, actions and sound as his background. Using fragments from human myth and history, he expresses his personal condition in a socio-political context – expressions of threat and existential anxiety are mixed with images striving for beauty and aesthetic qualities.
October 2004
Amanita Verna (Part 2 in the Amanita Virosa Trilogy)
(With Tamar Raban)
The work’s title refers to the poisonous “spring” mushroom, which is lethal despite its lively and vigorous name. Partly joking and partly menacing, Hefetz poses questions about social existence and power. Tamar Raban, on the other hand – a “consoling figure” according to the artist – poses an antithesis to these questions, expressing a preoccupation with the pain of the Palestinian Other. Hefetz’s private world of anxiety is intermingled with fragmentary allusions to Jewish and Israeli history, simultaneously expressing personal and collective sensibilities.
January 2005
Amanita Virosa: Part 3 in a Trilogy
In this, the third part of the Amanita Virosa trilogy, Hefetz’s image, duplicated on the television monitor and on the video screen, is meant to convey the sense of a decomposed existence. The various texts (which include ideological and journalistic pieces, as well as a soup recipe) – read to the audience, and read again during the screenings – are intermixed and intermingled, indicating a world without logos, empty and nihilistic.
