"In Israel, before they come looking for artists, they'll shut down newspapers and public television."

Weimar (Germany)The mother of Israeli artist Sigalit Landau (Jerusalem, 1969) was born in London after her family fled Vienna. Her father was born in Romania, survived the Holocaust, and emigrated to Israel when he was 10. Landau is known in Catalonia for the exhibition dedicated to him by the MACBA in 2014, an exhibition that she considers important in her career because she felt listened to and then realized that her path was "very clear".

At the Macba, then directed by Bartomeu Marí, Landau displayed a group of works inside the Capilla dels Àngels, and now she participates for the second time in the Kunstfest in Weimar with a work, entitled Tower of Torment, in which the site once again plays an essential role. It's a video shot in the tower of the former Gauforum, the Nazi forced labor complex in Weimar, now a museum. In this video, which can be seen in the tower itself, a girl leans out of one of the windows and begins to paint the facade white with a spool of paint, following a radial pattern. But when she's finished, she finds a man on the stairs heading to the same spot and begins to cover up his white circle with black paint. Thus, as Landau says, the window becomes a warning sign, "a hole, a wound, and a void." The filming was eventful because she was unable to travel to Weimar due to the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran; these events spurred her on, and she introduced red into the video, like a stream of blood spilling from the tower window, a stain that makes the work even more contemporary. "I have to take the elements and work with them because, even though I'm in mourning, I'm still creating," says Landau. "I created a more disturbing piece than I expected, because gravity pulls the painting down the building," he emphasizes.

Landau has been described as an artist who works on the theme of identity through exchange. Another of her best-known works is the project to build a peace and environmental bridge south of the Dead Sea to unite Israel and Jordan. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is a recurring theme in her work, and she traveled to Weimar days after the general strike in which nearly one million people demanded an agreement to reach a ceasefire and oppose the policy of total occupation of the Palestinian territory. "We have the opposite of a bridge, which is an island. We are devastated like an island of lepers," the artist laments. "The last strike didn't reach one million people, but perhaps we will. Of the nine million people who live in Israel, one million will take to the streets, and more than half of the people will say."

"Our society is completely split in two directions. Those in survival mode want this strong leader, and we have examples in the United States and Russia. The other direction is that the country should be for the citizens and for the people who actually live in Israel," he adds.

"A very disastrous plan."

The inauguration of Tower of Torment It came at the same time the Israeli government announced the start of its operation to occupy Gaza City. "If you conquer Gaza, you'll end up with more citizens who won't have any rights. It's a very disastrous plan, and the fact that such a delusion becomes a real, concrete plan makes you want to slit your wrists; it depresses you deeply," Landau says.

And can artists do anything about all this? "In Israel, artists are in a bad way. We're part of this supposedly invented left-wing elite, something our government detests, and before they come looking for us and stop our work, I think they'll shut down the newspapers and public television. I don't want to exaggerate: we're still a democracy, but we feel like we're riding high. Buchenwald is very close to the highway, and the Gauforum tower is the example of the worst that can happen in history," Landau recalls. "Every artist in the world, and every thinking person, is rethinking things."

Faust turned into Elon Musk

The war in the Middle East is very present in another of the highlights of the opening day of the Kunstfest: the world premiere of the condensed version that the South African playwright and director Brett Bailey has made of the second part of Splendor. One of the most unique features of the show, titled Faust X, is Bailey's use of AI and how he's brought the classic into the modern day, putting Elon Musk in Faust's shoes. "I work a lot with AI, I ask a lot of questions in ChatGPT to unleash the imagination, to find solutions, music," says Bailey. For example, he replaced the original's Helen of Troy with Nefertiti and designed the masks worn by the characters and some of the sets using an image-generating program. Among all the changes, the wildest moment of the show is Faust-Musk's delirium to execute the Israeli far-right's plan on the Gaza Riviera, armed with a chainsaw, like the famous image of Trump and Milei. Faust X is a commission from the festival to mark the 250th anniversary of Goethe's arrival in the city.

As a counterpoint to these two works, the festival started in the Plaza del Teatre with Dance people, an interactive dance performance by the Lebanese-French company Maqamat, directed by Omar Rajeh and Mia Habis, in which the dancers engaged the audience to dance with them and also collaborated on the set design and the performance texts. All of this turned this performance into a place of encounter and collective action.