The Dust Channel

Roee Rosen’s new film, shown at documenta 14, is a lyric opera with a Russian libretto, set in the home of a bourgeois Israeli family whose fear of dirt, dust and any other extraneous presence becomes a perverse devotion to household appliances used for cleaning, especially vacuum cleaners. The song gives life to a menage a trois between a young couple and their Dyson DC07 vacuum cleaner, an absurd relationship that pays tribute to the surrealist classic Dalí and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou, in which perversion and transgression emerge from a bourgeois household. Pictures of ‘adorable’ cleanliness and ‘fearsome’ dirt are linked to the relationship between the couple and the phantoms that enter their home: servants, refugees and the policemen who persecute them. In this film, Rosen figuratively associates dust with sand, both of which symbolize current forms of xenophobia. The reference is the detention center where political refugees not recognized by the State of Israel are held is in the desert and is called Holot, “sand” in Hebrew.