Mishpat Mokesh (A Mined Sentence)

Sasportas examines the ways in which latent information embedded in the chambers of the collective unconscious reverberates in a visible sphere of human action, and how charged spaces – geographical, political, or emotional – continue to operate and exert influence beneath the surface. Through prolonged immersion in sensitive sites across Europe and Israel, she seeks to activate and recode areas shaped by historical mechanisms of repression and denial. Mishpat Mokesh consists of a series of clay mines, each containing an internal cipher: hand-drawn seismographic lines from a silent sound work. These drawings were produced from depth recordings performed inside more than 138 trees in Germany's Black Forest, near the cabin of the philosopher Martin Heidegger and in the approximate vicinity of the charged, unresolved encounter between Heidegger and the poet Paul Celan in 1967. The trees – mute witnesses to an event known about by only a few – are transformed in Sasportas's work into a living archive. Their sounds are inscribed by needles and pencils that burn vibrations into a metal body embedded in a mine. A Hebrew letter is inscribed on the base of each mine; the letter combinations form words, verses, and sentences imbued with intention and meaning. Lake of Nothingness is the third of six mined sentences cast into depths across Europe and Israel between 2020 and 2025. The act of casting the mines was carried out from a fishing boat, dropping them into Banter See in Wilhelmshaven, Germany – a lake that served as camouflage for an underground bunker constructed during the Third Reich.