Beauty in a bulldozer

A Palestinian artist turns tools of destruction into works of terrifying beauty.

By SAMUEL THROPE
Beauty in a bulldozer (photo credit: SAMUEL THROPE )
Beauty in a bulldozer
(photo credit: SAMUEL THROPE )
Palestinian artist Eid Suleiman Hadaleen has a strange affection for bulldozers. In his workshop in the West Bank Bedouin village of Um Al Khayr in the South Hebron Hills, Hadaleen’s scale model bulldozer sculpture idles on a table by the door. Painted banana yellow, with an articulating blade, reflective mirrors, red flags, and the CAT logo emblazoned on its side, the sculpture looks ready to fire up its engine and go to work. Another bulldozer in progress reveals innards of recycled plastic, wire, and scrap metal.
Hadaleen’s sculptures seem surprising not only as works of art – is there so much beauty in a bulldozer? – but because in Um Al Khayr, a bulldozer is a monstrous thing.
Every building in the village is under threat of demolition by the Israeli Civil Administration that administers Area C, the part of the West Bank under full Israeli control. Several demolitions have been carried out over the past ten years, the latest this past January. The reason given is that the structures in question were built without permits. This is no doubt true: for many Palestinians, obtaining a legal building permit is nearly impossible. For Hadaleen, this injustice is made even more bitter by the fact that the bordering and sometimes violent Israeli settlement of Carmel, separated from Um Al Khayr by only a thin, barbed-wire fence, is constantly expanding. “In Carmel, they’re building beautiful houses,” Hadaleen tells The Jerusalem Report in fluent Hebrew, “and here they’re demolishing.”
Bulldozers are the stars of these demolitions.
Roaring and snorting, a bulldozer can eat a house and reduce a home to rubble in a matter of minutes. In a video of the most recent demolition in Um Al Khayr in January 2012, the Palestinian residents and Israeli soldiers seem weak and insignificant next to the powerful machine. The man sitting high in the vehicle’s glass cage looks more like a rider trying to harness an elephant than a driver steering a car.
Hadaleen witnessed the demolition that day, and countless others in Um Al Khayr and elsewhere in the area south of Hebron – including the demolition of his own home. His goal in making these sculptures is precisely to address the machines’ terrifying power. “In this place especially, with house demolitions, and when it’s not clear what our fate will be,” he explains, “people think that the bulldozer is an evil instrument that destroys houses.”
On a scorching June afternoon in his studio, Hadaleen explains his motivation for making art in the image of something he loathes. “Why did I build it? Because I think this tool serves human beings. It can do damage, it can crush you, it can crush a car. It can erase. But what do we understand in the end? The tool has no soul; the man who sits inside and drives it decides how it will be used.”
Innocence
From plastic bottles, scrap metal, used wires, and other discarded materials he finds on the hillsides, Hadaleen constructs his model bulldozers, as well as tractors, helicopters, cars, and planes. The sculptures, ranging in length from six inches to several feet, have doors that open and close, and moving rotors and blades.
The resemblance to toys is precisely to the point. Menacing though the vehicles might seem in real life, Hadaleen wants to impress on the viewer their innocence and instrumentality – and, at the same time, the moral responsibility of the men and women who operate them. “People can be good or evil, but not tools,” he continued. “Tools work for us. Why do we blame the tools all the time?” Hadaleen’s home and workshop sit facing south towards the Negev desert. The house is a small, clean and bright two-room structure, made of plastered stone walls and a sheetmetal roof, which the artist shares with his wife Na’ama, 27, who grew up in the same village, and their two daughters Sadin, 3, and Lin, 1.
Alongside the pots and pans, cushions, and computers – though Um Al Khayr is not connected to the electricity grid, the villagers have an array of solar electrical panels, also under threat of demolition, donated by the Israeli organization Comet-ME – Hadaleen’s sculptures sit on almost every available surface. A pair of black helicopters crouch on the half-wall separating the kitchen from the living room, with its long floor cushions and colorful carpet. A white truck, one of the bulldozers, and a green tractor are parked on a small table by the door. Just outside, a canvas roofed lean-to shades a workbench piled with tools and two sculptures under construction: a nearly three-foot-long model of a white military transport plane and the second bulldozer.
Hadaleen earns his livelihood through parttime work with the Halo Trust, a humanitarian organization that helps to clear landmines from former conflict zones. He locates unexploded ordnance in the South Hebron hills, the deadly detritus of Israeli military target practice and weapons testing in the area.
Hadaleen informs the ID F, who remove the dangerous shells.
Hadaleen completed the first of these sculptures, a model of a Sikorsky CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter, in 2009. “I saw this military helicopter passing above, and I looked down and saw an unused plastic bucket discarded on the ground,” Hadaleen said, recalling the moment of inspiration. “I looked at the helicopter and I looked at the plastic at the same time. I said to myself, what do you think about building a helicopter like that?” The technical skill and detail is impressive.
It is a near-perfect replica of the full-sized heavy military helicopter, originally designed for the United States Marines. A deep, menacing black, the model has tiny, transparent windows, rolling wheels, and turning rotors. The body of the helicopter is marked by scuffs and scratches, the remnants of its former bucket life. As in all his sculptures, the different pieces of the plastic body are stitched together and held in place by thin wires.
Message
As with the bulldozer, Hadaleen has a clear message in mind for his military model.
While most consider the helicopter only an instrument of death, Hadaleen emphasizes that it can also be a rescue vehicle, ferrying accident victims to safety. “I knew that people would say to me, ‘Why did you build an evil tool and not a good one?’ But that’s my point: to build it is to say to people that it’s not the tool that causes trouble.”
On the ground just outside of Hadaleen’s house, sitting in the sun, is a pile of scraps, bits of metal and wire, and plastic fragments that could be mistaken for a trash heap. These are Hadaleen’s raw materials, gathered from the village and the surrounding hillsides.
Working alone, it can take up to a month to assemble a sculpture from these recycled parts. According to his own estimation, Hadaleen buys only one percent of the materials that make up his models, mostly paints and specialty parts. This is no accident; caring for the environment through cleaning the village and showing the usefulness of its trash is as important to Hadaleen as his moral message.
The most impressive technical aspect of his work, though, is the fact that he does not work from blueprints or sketches, but designs each sculpture only in his imagination. For a sculpture like the bulldozer, which has hundreds of small parts, this is a phenomenal feat.
“I look at pictures a few times from the Internet,” Hadaleen explains, “then it’s in my head and I can start cutting the pieces according to the image. I can see how everything will be in place, like the wheels, the windows, everything.”
Lithe and balding at 28, Hadaleen is exceptional not only because of his art. A vegetarian, a peace activist, a Tai Chi practitioner, and a fluent Hebrew and English speaker, Hadaleen stands out from the village’s boisterous crowd. He radiates intelligence and commands attention.
Hadaleen was born and raised in Um Al Khayr, one of nine brothers and sisters, and attended the UNR WA school in his village.
While he never received formal training, his artistic inclinations exhibited themselves from an early age. His father is a shepherd, like most in the village, and his mother is a homemaker. They both encouraged his talent.
Hadaleen began constructing models at twelve and the family home was soon filled with boats, planes, cars, and other sculptures.
Despite the encouragement he received from his family, others in the small community were critical of his art.
Destroyed
“Some people said, ‘You’re not making any money from this, so why are you doing it?’” he recalls. “They said that what was important was work, that it’s a waste of time, that it’s not art, that it’s nothing.” The weight of this criticism, coupled by a difficult period economically, was too much to bear. In desperation and anger, Hadaleen destroyed his sculptures in 2007. None of this early work has survived.
While he returned to art with his helicopter two years later, the critics in the village remain. “It’s not easy to work in a place like this and to start to do things that seem so strange,” Hadaleen says. However, the accolades that his work has begun to receive in Israel and abroad are a source of encouragement and strength. “It’s more important to me that one person says that this is wonderful than ten who say that it’s not. Now more and more people are coming, saying how great it is, how wonderful, and you feel like people respect you.”
Hadaleen’s recent recognition owes a great deal to Eid, a short film produced in 2011 by the Saaheb Collective and David Massey, an Israeli filmmaker. The film, shot in stopmotion animation, shows Hadaleen at work on the sculpture of a green John Deere tractor, documenting the process from the cutting of the first plastic pieces to the last dab of paint.
The film addresses both the fun and play of Hadaleen’s creations and their seriousness.
While the film opens with images of Um Al Khayr’s ramshackle houses and tents against the backdrop of Carmel’s rising villas, and includes footage of the demolition of Hadaleen’s parents’ home, Massey has also captured the artist’s joy in his work and creativity. The final shot is of the new tractor rolling free over the village’s rocky hillside under the light of a full moon.
In May, Hadaleen traveled with Massey to a showing at the Palestine Film Festival at the Barbican Centre in London, his first trip abroad. “The movie was supposed to help Hadaleen get into art college, to make a portfolio, but when it was done friends suggested we send it to a festival,” says Massey. “To my surprise, there were a few that accepted it.
One of the most powerful parts of this movie is when you see his parents’ house being demolished, but he says ‘I think in a different way.’ In a very violent situation, he manages to transform it and manages to be nonviolent.”
Closer to home, Hadaleen received an unexpected call one day from an Israeli settler living in Carmel. The caller, a man in his forties, had seen the film and wanted to express his appreciation. “He said to me, ‘This is great, it’s wonderful,’” Hadaleen recalls. “I said, Thank you very much. I’m not going to tell anyone not to talk to me. I know that in every place there are good people. There are good people in Carmel too; this man respects what I do.”