Seara/Storm *
In 1950 during a party on the roof of Marian Loop, celebrating the 100 anniversary of Tomas Robinson’s invention of the wind meter, Regina Handke, Marian Loop and Joao Delgado decided to build a wind meter as a quotation to Robinson’s original machine.
Regina Handke, the Hungarian-Yiddish poet, who began in those days to learn Hebrew, told her friends that in Modern Hebrew there are two meanings to the word “seara”: hair and storm**. Delgado and Loop got excited from the linguistic discovery, and decided to build a wind meter based on a hair.
In 1955 the machine was brought to Israel and activated in a symbolic and nationalistic act, using David Ben Gurion’s hair. This experiment made Ben Gurion very disappointed from his hair quality, who sent the machine away.
In 2005 the machine was exhibit for the first time in fifty years in the frame of the Jerusalem Film Festival. In 2006 the machine is exhibited again , this time not only the wind meter has been repaired but also the sound-wind visual meter.
* This machine is part of sala-manca’s collection of Joao Delgado’s works.
** She was not aware that although the pronunciation is the same, “seara” for hair and “seara” for storm have a different Hebrew spelling.
vers. 1.0 – presented at the Intersection – Jerusalem Film Festival 2005, Heara 10-The Science Museum, Jerusalem, February 2006