Exploitation touristique de l’occupation.
« Banksy’s ’Walled Off Hotel’ is a form of gentrification » | Mondoweiss, 6 mars 2017.
►http://mondoweiss.net/2017/03/banksys-walled-gentrification
Anonymous British street artist Banksy just opened “The Walled Off Hotel” four yards from Israel’s apartheid wall in Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. It is marketed as the hotel with “the worst view in the world.”
The hotel is only Banksy’s latest artwork in the occupied Palestinian territories. He made his first mark on the wall in 2005, when he painted nine scenes that depict trompe l’oeil escapes from dust and cement to blue skies and green landscape. Banksy also snuck into the Gaza Strip ten years later, after Israel’s Operation Protective Edge leveled and devastated the territory, leaving in its wake a death toll of more than 1,500 Palestinian civilians. On this latter trip, Banksy painted murals amongst the razed infrastructure and made a two-minute satirical video that advertises Gaza as a unique travel destination while drawing attention to Israel’s siege and violence on the open-air prison.
While Banksy’s new hotel has drawn much praise from the international community for its initiative to attract tourists to the West Bank and educate them through space as a medium and an object of art, I would like to push against that and offer my two cents on the classic quasi-masturbatory nature of war tourism and art, and its unsurprising prevalence in the Palestinian Question.
This found art capitalizes on an occupation of a people that was founded by and maintained through violence; violence is thus its bedrock. Palestinian suffering becomes an exhibit to a very specific class of tourists who are able to enter the West Bank—to begin with—essentially reproducing the image of struggle in landscape and completely robbing it of its ability to speak for itself. It normalizes its public image and renders it pornographic, educational, amusing, and excessive. The initiative thrives on the continual existence of such violence, and therefore, through the artistic statement, ensures its eternity. The exhibit depends on the maintenance of apartheid, effectively rooting for its prolonged, permanent existence. The hotel begs the presence of the wall.
