Jessie Boylan

The Sound of Jets | 2009
 
 
“These are places of erasure and amnesia” – Adam Broomberg and Oliver Channarin
 
 
The Sound of Jets refers to landscapes of overt and hidden violence. Landscapes of
war, horror, violence, trauma, erasure and alienation, in which the architecture of
fear and control dominates the Israeli, Palestinian and observer’s psyche. It attempts
to not focus on specific acts of violence, but rather on the landscapes which are used
as the set to reinforce violence in more restrained ways.   
 
Looking at images of war, horror and violence has become an almost empty act, one
so common that we barely take notice, that our consciousness diverts its attention
and glazes over, neutralising and oppressing our ability to understand trauma. These
images are of modes of violence and control, which inhibit the citizen’s physical and
mental environment in every day life.  
 
Israeli writers and teachers Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ofir describe to two different
modes of violence which are at play in the Israeli-Palestinian landscape: explosive
and restrained - overt and tactile. Explosive violence “can be an outburst, a bomb or
something, or it can be insinuated and harm traces somewhere”. “The most
restrained form of violence doesn’t explode, it’s the violence of the checkpoint, the
roads, [the settlements], it’s the daily violence of the presence, the display of forces
throughout the territories that works through the organisation of space... And it’s this
kind of violence which disturbs, destroys and interferes, that rules the life of the
population, in different ways than the exploding violence.”