Crumbs

In the video installation Crumbs, Chefetz embarks on a genealogical journey, seeking to trace a topography of lineage and locate findings within a family story that, until now, remained sealed in the past. The work features a recorded conversation with his mother and grandmother, chronicling a century of migration from Algeria to Morocco, then to France, and finally to Israel. It is there that the family disintegrated; Chefetz's mother and her brother were raised as "outside children" in Kibbutz Malkiya, living apart from their parents.

 

While listening to the conversation, the viewer observes a staged scene: Chefetz sits alone at a dining table, performing a "choreography" of gathering crumbs at the end of a meal. During visits to relatives in France, whom he barely knew, communal meals revealed themselves as an effective ritual for producing familiarity out of nothing. This final act of gathering crumbs emerged as a recurring family trait. It becomes a metaphor for collecting fragments of information, attempts to reconstitute the family, the act of "sweeping under the rug," and the precise moment where fleeting intimacy begins to dissipate.

 

The video is embedded in a single-person dining table, a replica of the one in Chefetz's apartment. The visitor is invited to sit on a chair from a kibbutz dining hall, an object the artist uses in his daily life, mirroring his own solitary meals, where a digital screen fills the void as a surrogate for connection.