The Black Box is Orange

Abstract

The Black Box is Orange is a multimodal thesis project composed of three interconnected parts: a 51-minute film, a written text, and a 70-page field guide. Together, they provide the geographic, visual, and historical contexts that piece together the fragmented timeline of my childhood.

The project examines how personal and collective memory are shaped by the absence of archives. It begins with my family’s abrupt emigration from the USSR to Israel, which resulted in the loss of our family’s entire photographic record, and our subsequent settlement in a small Israeli border town called Shlomi, built on the remains of a thriving Palestinian village destroyed in 1948 for which visual records no longer exist.

The film reconstructs childhood memories through a combination of 16mm footage, voiceover, and 35mm slide presentations. It traces how settler-colonial policies structure daily life in an apartheid state focusing on everyday events to avoid sensationalism. The written component situates these memories within macro- and micro-histories of land dispossession, bureaucratic erasure, and a deliberately buried archive, while the field guide maps memory through meaningful encounters with plants and flowers.