At the risk of giving away what happens in the interview (the following is a spoiler I suppose), there is a point I consider rather wonderful in which Eilat reveals my own ignorance of the situation on the ground in Israel/Palestine. This instance occurs around Reem Fadda's statement during her talk with Eilat at The New School: Israel/Palestine is a "laboratory for mobility." Associating the Liminal Spaces' video where Palestinians and Israelis can see through the wall separating them, I mistook this seeing through walls for the actual practice of walking through walls of Israeli soldiers in the Palestinian territory. Such a slight misunderstanding leads to a huge irony currently in Israel/Palestine: that Israel's military is systematically studying canonical texts by post-May '68 "Post-Structuralist" French theorists in order to train their soldiers for guerilla conflict. In short, in preparation for raids on Palestinian homes, Israeli soldiers are drilling holes in consecutive Palestinian dwellings so that they do not have to exit through the front door, and thus risk exposure to possible sniper fire and other guerilla tactics by Palestinian insurgents. This revelation and others were profound to me (profoundly interesting and disappointing) admiring French intellectual discourse post-May '68 and not anticipating the violent purposes to which these inspiring texts could be put.

I think the value of this interview, for those who have experienced the conflict in the Middle-East first hand, will be one of realizing how artists are responding in practical and insightful ways to a conflict that does not cease to haunt a global conscience. For those familiar with the ongoing geopolitical conflict in the Middle-East, or who have little awareness of the response to it by contemporary artists, I think this interview will illuminate some particulars about the conflict, as well as the high stakes of aesthetic response.

Thom Donovan: What is the Mobile Archive?

Galit Eilat: It's an archive of around 1000 video works by different artists that travels from one place to another, from one institute to another. It started about three years ago in collaboration with the Kunstverein in Hamburg. The director asked us to prepare a show and one of the ideas was to bring the archive. So we set up a framework by which we could copy our archive and deliver it to another institute. Today each new institute with whom we work adds up to twenty-five new works to the existing archive. The mobile archive therefore is growing all the time.

TD: Do you see an evolution to the archive based on the different places it's traveled to? Where has the archive traveled so far?

GE: It was in Germany. It was in Italy twice. It was in Venice and Milan. It was in Zagreb [Croatia]. Glasgow. It was in Ljubljana [Slovenia].

CT: It's always changing because each institution adds up to 25 DVDs. By definition it changes each time because it has to with each stop.

GE: But the viewer’s perception of the archive also depends on which institution is curating it and making decisions about how to deal with it, how to present it. So it's not just the content, but also the form. Discussion can arise around different issues related to the archive. So we are not only talking about the video works themselves, but how they become articulated.

TD: So each different institute articulates the meaning of the archive in its unique way?

GE: It's a different context. Different curators choose to show different works to a particular audience.