The dust channel

The Dust Channel is a cultural exquisite corpse: an operetta with a libretto in Russian about a British home appliance, a Dyson DC07 Vacuum Cleaner, set in an Israeli reality of private perversion and socio-political phobias.
The Russian text is an animation chant, meant to bring to life the vacuum cleaner by telling it its own history. It is a narrative of the ingenious designer Dyson and his vacuum cleaners – a story of beauty and fetishistic seduction that arrives at moment of bigotry. The diegesis, however, offers a different story altogether: a ménage à trois between a handsome, affluent couple, and their Dyson DC07 cleaner – a surreal affair which pays homage on several levels to a surreal classic wherein perversion and transgression appears from within bourgeois domesticity: Dalí and Buñuel’s chien Andalou).
Images of loving cleanliness, fearful dirt and the social and psychological import they breed are linked to the relation between the homeowners and the presences that enter their house: cleaners, refugees, and the policemen who pursue them. While this narrative willfully offers itself as an insular, private affair, dirt and dust are associated figuratively with sand and the desert, obliquely pointing at specific and current forms of xenophobia: the detention center “Holot,” wherein political refugees unrecognized as such by the State are held for long terms.
(Roee Rosen)