My shadow, the hand on the sand dial, slowly

Leaning towards the other side,

Backwards, backwards. I never knew

That what was erased will come back to greet me.

Dan Pagis

Ruts are the grooves that an armored vehicle wears into the ground, jagged traces that can be followed in the sand. Post-trauma is also like grooves, marked into the ground of the soul. It imprints the iron body inside the remembering body, engraves and encrypts in it a consistent and repeating mechanical mechanism.

David Sosnovsky, an industrial designer, illustrator and fighter in the Israeli Armored Corps, has been battling post trauma following Operation Defensive Shield at the Jenin refugee camp in 2002. About six months ago, his book Aba Tank (Papa Tank) was published, which he wrote and illustrated. The book looks into the mental space of a man who is imprinted by a tank, with the aim of sharing the distress he is experiencing with his children. But papa-tank is only part of the story of those who live the tank every day. The Tire Ruts exhibition seeks to further open the hatch to this space-time.

Like many who live hidden among us, David’s world exists in a dual space-time. Always here and there, alert, never protected, never quite at home.  This is the inconstant path, lost without a compass, which was assimilated by someone who was enclosed for two weeks in a tank in the heart of Jenin, a stationary target lost in the middle of a refugee camp. What are the road signs of someone who finds himself in urban warfare, and sees the plaster on the walls of the houses through the turret’s scope? How do you survive in an oxymoronic space (urban/warfare) when you return to your home routine? How do you take control of the mechanical system that takes over you?

The flow of works in the exhibition deploys the mechanism of post-traumatic action as a kind of tank tread, in which one day follows another and one link holds the next. In the eternal circular movement, every occurrence carries a wave, and every wave carries a memory. David amazingly expresses this integrated mechanism through the hybrids he creates. A tank that is a person, a house that is a tank, a peaceful neighborhood that is a potential battlefield. The post traumatic tread moves forward and retracts, leaving its marks on childhood memories that preceded the formative event.

But the post-traumatic is also a life instinct, a survival mechanism that seeks to protect. Its creative force is a pulsating artery, giving shape but also changing shape, hybrid and modular, funny and annoying, immortalizing but also allowing to escape, serving to fix the stain but also the trembling and spilling of watercolors.