Nisso Kaabia graduated from Yoram Levinstein’s Acting Studio; He is a drama teacher and an actor who specializes in work with children and teenagers, and he now builds a drama group that will act in Tel Aviv.
The Theatrical work shall reflect the group’s activity and deal with personal and collective memory, aiming to create through that process a dramatic creation based on the contents that will surface during the work.
Teenagers from Gush Dan, ages 14-16 are welcome to participate.
Tamar Paikes, a plastic artist resides and creates in Jerusalem
These days, concluding several years of labor, Tamar has finished “Cardboard Squares”, a documentary film relating the way she coped with the complex experience of grief which befell on her family; a family who lost a father and two older brothers. Her father Michael Paikes was killed during the Six Day war, her eldest brother Yoni was killed in Ramat Ha’Golan during the Yom Kipur war, and Daniel, her second brother, fell while climbing the top of the Monte -Blanc. The movie tells the personal story of Tamar and her family, while simultaneously raising questions of memorialization and memory on an overall level as well, concerning our Israeli society, which has been exposed to grief throughout its existence and development.
During this film we accompany Tamar’s journey in the footsteps of her Father and two brothers, as she meets family members and friends from the past, while sharing with us her fears and misgivings through words and artistic creation.
Her mother Arnona acts as a central axis in this film, an extraordinary woman who held, with all her power, a family that grew smaller and smaller with each catastrophe throughout the years. After all the men in the family died, she was left with two daughters.
Tamar relates her story: “throughout the years, I lived an allegedly normal life, as if there is no grief. Only during the making of this film did I understand that every step I make stems from a ceaseless dialogue with the dead. Throughout the four years of working on this movie, I’ve been trying to unveil the atmosphere of mystery and vagueness surrounding the residence of death within the house I grew up in. After years of living in the shadow of a silence accompanying the grief in my house, in this movie I try to confront between the repression dictated by my mother and my basic existential need to talk and share my pain. The movie moves between two poles, on the one end is a widow and loving mother, bereaved, cynical, disillusioned, and angry, keeping at a distance any national symbols that appropriate grief and the dead into the heart of the nation. A woman who espouses the idea that life belongs to life, believing that there is no use to fiddle with the dead. I stand on the opposite pole, grappling, for the first time in my life, with the classical formula of memory formation: a visit to the cemetery, touring the location where the brother fell, and meeting friends of the death. The movie examines the two alternatives.
I’m constantly attempting to connect the disjoint fragments, and to find my own path, this is a necessary condition for my sanity. I lost my father before I took my first breath in this world. I never chose this or what happened later. I want to meet the world again on my own terms”.
Tamar participated in different projects of the ‘Raz-Ram’ foundation as a guiding artist. We look forward to the screening of the movie and the significant debate it will generate.
First prize, design contest “Creating a New Movement”
Graduated from the School of Industrial Design, Hadassah College, Jerusalem. A motorized tricycle for children with disabilities
A graduation project, School of Industrial Design, Hadassah College, Jerusalem, 2003, with “Tzora Active Systems Ltd.”
The project aims to design and develop a motorized tricycle that will accompany the child during physical rehabilitation treatments and afterwards, as an aid that would help the child achieve mobility, independence, and most of all – fun. The project aims to develop a product that will be seen as desirable to children, by treating children with disabilities first of all as children and not as invalids.
The Tricycle is based upon an Active Passive Trainer (APT) for upper and lower limb exercising that enables active and passive activity, according to the patient’s abilities.
The combination of the APT and the tricycle enables the children to ride the bicycle and suppresses pathological reflexes. Apart from the joy of physical activity, the children gain a treatment to improve their physical condition. The combination of the motor and a control system makes it possible to achieve various levels of effort and resistance that make the tricycle unique when compared to similar products.
The tricycle won the first prize in the Model Car Design Contest, “Creating a New Movement,” that was initiated by the Raz-Ram Foundation, under the aegis of the Association of Car Importers in Israel and the City of Nes-Tziona. The tricycle will be commercially manufactured by Tzora Active Systems, Ltd.
Tutoring in Photography leads to Photography Exhibition
The Raz-Ram Foundation supported the publishing of a collection of photographs and poems entitled “To Remember – To Breathe”. Ofra, who lost her father at a young age, reveals in words and through the camera lens a rich and complex emotional world, which has at its foundations, her creative expression of the experience of loss.
“To remember to breathe all the time don’t stop breathing even though you are tempted in your sleep when I’m near and when I’m distant remember there’s enough air for me too.”
Songs & pictures presentation
Shani lives in Tiberias and is a girl of multiple talents – she draws, dances and excels in everything she undertakes. The Raz-Ram Foundation decided to support her in her drawing, through a mentorship with Irena, an art teacher and immigrant from the former Soviet Union. Under this Tutorship, Shani’s artistic development has progressed in an amazing way, and her drawings of still lifes, animals and portraits express a depth of feeling that is unusual for an artist her age. Drawing has now taken a central role in her personal expression, and we are now waiting for her first exhibition.
The connection with Kfir, a young musician from Beer Sheva, began while he was still a student at a boarding school in Haifa. Kfir applied to the Foundation, and told us that his dream was to be a singer and to study music. Arnon Friedman, a pianist and professional musician who is very active in the Israeli music scene, tutored Kfir in singing, composition and arrangement of his own works. The emotionally charged songs that Kfir composed and arranged, with the musical guidance of Arnon, inspired the Foundation to produce a disc which includes a number of his works, with the participation, on a volunteer basis, of some of Israel’s leading musicians. One of the outstanding pieces on the disc is a song expressing Kfir’s pain over the loss of his beloved father. Now, Kfir’s dream to be a musician is coming true, out of the Tutorship and special connection he developed with Arnon.
