Makom-Al-Makom_catalog-new

E19 This land-exchange project has a biographical dimension as well, relating closely to both the artist's family's migratory history and his entire generation's commitment to putting down new roots in the land. According to Ullman's older brother, their father had entrusted the ten-year-old Micha with the task of digging seven cubic pits in the field adjacent to the family home, which the father would then fill with fertile hamra earth brought from another region of Israel. 15 Ullman's engagement with earth as an aesthetic medium appears to have been nourished by this early memory of exchanging earth to ensure fertility. In yet another earth project, Ullman shipped red hamra from his home in Israel to the Church of St. Matthew on Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, where he installed Steps (2012). The installation consists of seven iron stairs functioning as containers for the earth, which descend into a shaft filled with still more red hamra . The work is a memorial to the murdered resistance fighter Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was ordained as a priest in St. Matthew's in 1931. The pit's depth matches the artist's height, conforming to his practice of working to the scale of his own body. These human dimensions invest the installation with the solemnity of a burial chamber. Like the iron and earth sculptures Day and Midnight, it enfolds positive and negative, home and tomb, ground and underground. Steps brings to mind the American artist Walter de Maria's Earth Room , which itself originated in Munich, Germany, in 1968 (installed in New York in 1977). But in fact, Ullman's conflicted and traumatic emplacement, which involves fragile transportable ground, stands in stark contrast to the mass of black earth which fills De Maria's room with the sensuality of primal nature. In 1987, Ullman conceived and executed Grund (figure 10), which literally means "reason" in German but also resonates with the English term ground . Lifting a chunk of earth off the ground, he positioned it such that it extended above a pit surrounded by a grove of trees. 15 Ibid., 365. Figure 10: Ground (Grund), 1987, (Permanent) Skulptrenmuseum glaskasten, Marl, Germany Iron, earth, grass 15X15 m. Depth: 3 m., height from the ground: 1.06 m. Photographer: Micha Ullman