In the same line as Un Arabe supplémentaire, this action displaces artistic intervention outside the object and outside the explicit field of art, by acting directly within public space through exposed, displaced, and reappropriated identity signs. On June 21, 2025, during a demonstration in support of Palestine in Berlin, I chose to wear my kippah and my keffiyeh. I was also carrying, at the end of a stick, the torso of a baby made of polyurethane foam, without arms or legs, like a fragment of a body pulled from the rubble after the bombing of Gazan civilians, on which the word “thank you” in Hebrew — תודה — had been engraved and blackened. Only one photograph of the baby torso and five photographs taken on the fly by friends during the demonstration remain of this action.

As with Un Arabe supplémentaire, this was neither a performance in the classical sense of the term, nor a staging intended for the art world, but a presence strategically exposed to a regime of reading already in place. Where the action with the beard brought to light the mechanisms of racial assignation through which a body could be immediately read as “Arab” and therefore suspect, this one intervened in another field of conflations: the one that tends to make Jews coincide with the State of Israel, and criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Wearing the kippah and the keffiyeh at a demonstration for Palestine thus meant introducing a dissonance into the perceptual economy of the moment. The gesture consisted in making visible, within a space itself structured by contradictory identity projections, a presence that the dominant order tends to erase: that of a Jew opposed to Israeli policy and, more broadly, to the historical continuum of violence associated with the founding and maintenance of that State. It was not a matter of affirming a religious identity in the confessional sense, but of activating a sign historically and politically charged in order to break an imposed framing.

In this sense, the action belonged to a politics of visibility. It did not produce a spectacular image; it introduced a body and a few signs into a regime of perception saturated by the confusion maintained between Jewishness, Zionism, and support for the Israeli State. This confusion operates in a doubly dangerous way: it exposes Jews to being conflated with the crimes of a State, while at the same time allowing that State to symbolically lay claim to Jews as a whole in order to neutralize part of the criticism directed at its policy. The action aimed, on the contrary, to disjoin these terms, to make their non-coincidence perceptible.

The baby torso carried aloft extended this gesture of disjunction. A fragment of a body without face, without limbs, reduced to the state of a remnant, it condensed the material reality of the bombing of civilians while refusing any monumentalization. The inscription of the word תודה — “thank you” — introduced into it an ironic and accusatory violence: not a sincere expression of gratitude, but the condensed formulation of a political cynicism, as if destruction itself could be covered over by the language of gratitude, justification, or debt. Hebrew here became not the sign of an adherence, but the very site of a critical reversal. The object was destroyed after fulfilling its function.

The reactions provoked by the action confirmed this hypothesis. Most of the people who came up to me were young Muslim boys, surprised to see a Jew taking part in a demonstration in support of Palestine. The confusion between Jews and Israel was therefore very much present in their minds, but it was quickly replaced by joy. Many wanted to take a photo with me, as if to make visible what the dominant political space tends precisely to render invisible, or even unthinkable: that a Jew could stand there, publicly, not despite this cause, but for it. In this sense, the action was not directed only against Israeli policy; it was also, explicitly, an action against antisemitism, by attacking one of its most toxic contemporary mechanisms: the conflation between Jews and the State of Israel.

The effectiveness of such a gesture depends neither on immediate recognition as a work, nor on formal autonomy, but on its capacity to intervene in the very conditions of legibility of bodies and signs. What matters first is not the image produced, but the displacement operated in a real situation: making appear, within a framework saturated with identity projections, a dissociation that this framework structurally tends to erase.

Photos taken by: Marilyne Griffon, Ana Lopez and Nicolas Giraldon.