In 2004, Francis Alÿs performed a walk in Jerusalem with a leaking can of green paint. The route he followed, also known as ‘the green line,’ was sketched on a map by Moshe Dayan in green wax pencil as part of the armistice agreement following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, to demarcate land under the control of the new state of Israel. This remained the border until the Six Day War in 1967 after which Israel occupied Palestinian-inhabited territories east of the line.

Filmed documentation of the walk was later shared with commentators from Israel, Palestine, and other countries, who were invited to react spontaneously to the action and the circumstances in which it was performed. The text included at the beginning of the film presents Alÿs’ intervention as an exploration of the axiom that, ‘sometimes doing something poetic can become political and sometimes doing something political can become poetic’.

The Israelites’ long walk through the same territories c.3,500 years earlier can also be understood as a symbolic performance, both political and poetic. God repeatedly tells Moses that ‘the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord’ (Exodus 7:5; 14:14). Walking for forty years in the wilderness can be interpreted as a form of protest through which the geo-political and moral map of the ancient Middle East is redrawn.

This political action also had poetic and spiritual power for those taking part. The story of the Exodus is a psycho-geography in which the journey is as important as the destination. God brought the Israelites out of Egypt and their physical experience and memory of the event was in order that they might know that the Lord is God (Deuteronomy 4:35). They were transformed into a covenant people through their experience of walking in the wilderness.