The first-place winner in the student competition is Danielle Alhasid with “The Song of the Stones.” In her work, Alhasid produces a unique language consisting of stop motion animation and sound. The work draws delicate and precise, and at the same time mysterious lines between the geographical and the physical and the digital and the fabricated, and between nature and human constructs.
The protagonists of the video animation are stones that mumble a recurring mantra, trying to transmit a hidden secret. The magic of stop motion animation gives a voice to the stones, which hold hidden memories of the city. The work focuses on the ritualistic experience of the encounter with the stones, the “eyes of the oracle,” which reveal fragments missing from collective memory. Old maps emerge from beneath the stones, only to be swallowed once again by a new grid. The video was created as part of a series of short animation films that explore the past of Tel Aviv.