ROEE ROSEN

The Dust Channel, 2016

The Dust Channel is a cultural exquisite corpse: an operetta with a libretto in Russian about a British home appliance, a Dyson DC07 Vacuum Cleaner, set in an Israeli reality of private perversion and socio-political phobias. While each of these layers offers its own resonances and substrata, they share communal and individual forms of xenophobia from within the private sphere of leisure and pleasure, abundance and perversions. 

The Russian text is an animation chant, meant to bring to life the vacuum cleaner by telling it its own history. The diegesis offers a different story altogether: a ménage à trois between a handsome, affluent couple, and their DC07. While this narrative wilfully offers itself as an insular, private affair, dirt and dust are associated figuratively with sand and the desert, obliquely pointing at a specific site  of xenophobia: the detention center “Holot,” wherein political refugees, unrecognised as such by the State of Israel, are detained.