A Matrixial Museum: Education in Almost-impossible Spaces

This paper is meant to scaffold an imaginary space for what is currently an almost impossible museum. It would reside on a border between Gaza and Israel. Artists and participants would be able to enter from both sides of the border into a circular and cavernous space to make, share and experience art together. In artwork that values its relational capacity to affect another, the move from aesthetics to ethics recalls our mutual place of origin understood in Bracha L. Ettinger’s Matrixial Theory (EMT) as “the matrixial womb.” Griselda Pollock’s Virtual Feminist Museum, Gur-Ze’ev’s counter-education, feminist pedagogy, and Art-care activism provide some strategies of unlearning in order to circumvent traditional institutions of education on either side of the border of Palestine and Israel. A collaborative image between Izhar Patkin and Shirin Neshat created for the human rights group “Witness” in 2005 is evaluated for its matrixial and Art-care potential. People who are Israeli and Palestinian have been coping for too long under oppressive social and political structures that cannot admit the other. As the war wages, and the eye of the storm rages above all our heads, community engagement in creative processes can open a language for liberatory possibilities. The goal is to usher symbols into new narratives that currently remain foreclosed from contemporary political or educational discourses. Nurtured in the matrixial sphere, from the womb born back into the world, could there be a deeper undercurrent that begins to imagine almost-impossible spaces and futures together?