GE: There is a very interesting article by Eyal Weizman for example, "Art of War," about how the army moves inside the refugee camps. The army walks through walls.

TD: Hence the video you showed the other night in which an artist produced a teleconference between the wall separating Israel from Palestine...

GE: Not seeing through walls. The soldiers walk through walls.

CT: Galit is referring to a popular practice among the Israeli military, which is instead of going outside a house you demolish a wall and go to the next house. You literally walk through walls.

GE: They drill a hole to protect themselves from being attacked because in the refugee camps houses are attached one to the other.

CT: They're like Brownstones in Brooklyn.

GE: You can go through the whole block. You know De Certeau, Foucault, Deleuze/Guattari... all those beautiful texts.

TD: They've become textbooks for the military. Post-structuralism has been absorbed by state military strategy.

GE: Yes.

TD: The other night at Parsons, Fadda spoke of "liberation curating." Would you call yourselves liberation curators?

CT: [laughs] I wouldn't call myself a liberation curator.

GE: [laughs] No, but I think it is something that people expect a curator to be, like a conductor. I think it's also happening because of all of this fuss about curators. Ten years ago the curator position depended on which artists were being curated, now the curator position is very strong. So this was what she was getting at.

CT: She was talking about it more in terms of wanting to liberate the curator from the exhibition structure and instead think about how cultural products and social experiences are created.

TD: Outside the context of the gallery or the institution, the thing that came to mind for me was ‘liberation theology’ [movement of radical Catholic religious leaders against Authoritarianism primarily in Latin America], which refers to religious/theological discourses that are politically directed towards empowering the dispossessed. Can we consider the Mobile Archive liberating in this sense?
 
CT: After the Parsons talk, one of the artists I had invited to participate in the archive became apprehensive. She said to me, "Oh, so the videos don't matter."

GE: But they do matter.

CT: I can understand why she thought that because we didn't really focus on any one artwork. I think it was because she was looking at the content rather than the form of the archive, and you obviously can't have one without the other. I think people need to see the show to understand this. And of course it's a very specific context for someone's art work. Someone also mentioned that I'm now curating curators, because I chose two guest curators to curate out of the archive. You're curating the Mobile Archive by deciding where it goes, and this becomes its own curatorial issue.

GE: And yet we provide a service to the artist. The artist doesn't have to distribute the work; to send it; to copy it; to push it. There is someone else to do this.

TD: The work will be cared for and shown to audiences who will be invested in the material...

CT: And it's in good company.

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Desire in Syracuse: the 'Come On' Controvery - "Alternately Sexy and Uncomfortable"

Marco Williams, director of Banished -a documentary on the systematic expulsions of African-Americans from the South and the need for reparations.

^{Images accompanying this article are stills from films featured in the Mobile Archive. The image on the featured page is from a film by Yossi Atia and Itamar Rose.}