‘I try to walk as if caressing the land by every step. I heard this suggestion attributed to the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, advice I carry with me always, especially as I walk through the streets of Jerusalem with my camera,” says Dr. Katya Mandoki.
“I cannot find the words to convey how immensely fortunate I am living in Jerusalem, specifically during these difficult times, which are not only historic but biblical, a continuation of the strife of the Jewish people to preserve and develop a culture of values that loves and celebrates life above all and expresses gratitude.”
What brought Mandoki to Jerusalem? Our past and present are interconnected and coexisting. Mandoki remembers her first day of kindergarten in Mexico City, when her mother gave her unusual instructions: “If anyone asks, say you are Jewish.”
She did not understand the meaning of Jewish, but she would soon find out when her friend withheld a birthday invitation and called out an accusation, an ancient, antisemitic trope that is imprinted from generation to generation: “My mother says you killed God.”
How luminous is Mandoki’s response, the instinctive words of a five-year-old girl, words that echo throughout history: “I swear to you from the bottom of my heart that I do not remember doing it.”
This exclusion marked the beginning of a lifelong journey of self-discovery, a journey that would carry her from a secular Hungarian home in Mexico to the kibbutz trenches in Israel, to philosophy, experimental art, innovations in the study of aesthetics, and eventually, to the streets of Jerusalem where she trains her observations and her camera lens on the prose of everyday life.
She recounts, “I had a hostile nanny who threatened me and my brother that we would go to hell for being Jewish unless we secretly attended Mass with her every Sunday. There, I heard unkind sermons from the priest about Jews, so I was always in fear that the entire congregation would suddenly turn and point at me and cry out, ‘She is a Jew,’ and attack me and my brother.
“Watching the Catholic girls in their long white dresses, carrying flowers for their First Communion, I longed to take part myself. When I told my father I wanted a First Communion, he absolutely refused and forbade us ever going to church again. My father was an atheist and viewed religion as private and behind doors.”
Another occurrence that impacted Mandoki was her shock at finding a slim, blue book in the library at home. It held testimonial photographs of Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust was something never mentioned in her home despite the fact that members of her family had been murdered amid Hungarian Jewry: her maternal grandmother, great-grandmother, and uncles. Her mother left Hungary for London just in time in August 1939.
Rarely socializing with friends, a quiet, introverted teenager and an avid reader, Mandoki read everything she could find about Judaism. She soon realized she had to make a choice: either assimilate into Mexican Catholic society or move to Israel. But how? All the members of her family were assimilated. Not being a part of any community, she did not have a way to achieve her dreams.
However, she had a friend. “I want to pay tribute to my classmate, Miriam Poplawsky, a Jewish girl with polio, in whom I confided my dream to go to Israel,” says Mandoki. “I owe her so much. From her, I learned about the existence of Jewish youth movements, which totally changed my life. A girl who had to walk with crutches gave me the wings to reach Israel. I joined Hanoar Hatzioni and became enamored with the history, values, culture, and music that were cultivated there. I became completely immersed, and I still am to this day.”
Mandoki made aliyah only months before war
In January 1967, she made the move. With her new community of young, idealistic Zionists, she traveled to Israel first by bus and then by airplane and arrived at Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha. A few months later, in June, the Six Day War broke out.
“We were digging trenches,” she recalls, “preparing the miklatim, bomb shelters, and delivering food to the kibbutz members fighting near the border, 2 km. from Gaza. A group of paratroopers were briefly stationed there, and we later heard that, tragically, most of them were killed in the war.
“After the Six Day War, I volunteered at Mei Ami military post, now a moshav next to Umm el-Fahm, and I felt deeply honored that I was entrusted with the care of 120 sheep on my own. I loved roaming with them in the countryside and when I called out in a certain high tone, the sheep followed me.”
Mandoki moved to Jerusalem to study philosophy. She says, “It was an interesting time with fiery debates at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and on the radio, between the analytic and metaphysical approaches to philosophy, among my professors Joseph Ben Shlomo, Dominican Father Marcel-Jacques Dubois, Yehuda Elkana, and Adi Zemach.”
For income, she was proud to be the first postwoman in Jerusalem delivering letters in various neighborhoods, but she tells me, “It was not without some macho resistance from my Mizrahi colleagues at the Givat Shaul Post Office. Being claustrophobic, I loved that job walking around in the open air just as I loved herding the sheep and as today, wandering the streets. I am a vagabond at heart.”
To pursue studies in art, Mandoki returned to Mexico City in 1975 and enrolled in the San Carlos Art Academy.
“As an art student,” she explains, “I wanted to explore a different way of preparing a canvas for easel painting, so instead of stretching it toward the edges of the frame to flatten it, I left it hanging loosely in real space with wrinkles and curves that I then emphasized with acrylic paint. As if pregnant canvases, the paintings grew beyond the frame, developing freely in space.
“Art for me is a mode of playing and exploring. I understand it as a feminine mode of expression, not a feminist idea of art, just a woman’s way of exploring matter and space, evolving from the plane to the three-dimensional through the textural possibilities of the material itself.”
That was the beginning of a series of experimental works entitled Concavexities (Sculpaintings, 1975-1978), exhibited in galleries and museums in Mexico.
Concavexities reflect Mandoki as a person
These radiant sculpture paintings symbolize the singular, remarkable persona of Mandoki who, as an artist, philosopher, author, and photographer, expands and pushes through limits to the limitless possibilities of life.
Combining the complexities of philosophy and art, she received a PhD with her dissertation titled Aesthetics and Power. Since 1980, she has been a professor of aesthetics and semiotics at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (UAM) in Mexico City.
Impressive and standing 16 meters tall in the Library Plaza of the university is Mandoki’s sculpture titled Histograma: Distribution of Income in Mexico, 1984-1985, which was awarded the National Prize in the Alternative Spaces, by the National Institute of Fine Arts.
“Histograma is a monument to the greatest shame of this country: social inequality. The disproportionate structure, made of scaffolding material as a metaphor for the economy, proposes the possibility of transforming it to obtain, one day, more proportionate relations,” explains Mandoki.
A sought-after lecturer, she has spoken at conferences on aesthetics and semiotics around the world and has contributed more than a hundred articles on everyday and evolutionary perspectives of philosophical aesthetics.
“Aesthetics,” Mandoki says, “is the theory of sensibility, of opening up perception by enhancing and refining the range of experience.”
In fact, she is recognized as the pioneer of the study of everyday aesthetics, coining the term Prosaics in opposition to the term Poetics used by Aristotle as the study of art. In this sense, for Mandoki, “aesthetics is a study of both poetics or artistic creations and prosaic expressions of people, which take place in social institutions such as the educational, the familial, the religious, the medical, and the state through sensibility’s encounters.”
“My main theoretical goal has been to alert how aesthetics can be used politically to manipulate people. Aesthetics is not only about art and beauty,” she says. “Nazi aesthetics, deployed by [Joseph] Goebbels, [Albert] Speer, and [Leni] Riefenstahl through propaganda, significantly contributed to their power not only over the German and Austrian people but also over its vast European enablers and sympathizers.”
Mandoki explores her ideas in her many publications, which include The Indispensable Excess of the Aesthetic: Evolution of Sensibility in Nature (Lexington Books, 2015) and Everyday Aesthetics: Prosaics, The Play of Culture and Social Identities (Routledge, 2016). (katyamandoki.com/books)
Innovative in her thinking, as a tenured professor, she founded the Postgraduate Program in Aesthetics, Culture and Semiotics of Design at her university (UAM), and, as to be expected, received the highest recognition on three occasions, in 1995, 2007, and 2015, for her research in Sciences and Arts for Design.
After her two sons left home and she retired from academia, Mandoki returned first to Safed and then to Jerusalem as a street photographer, and is pursuing a more spiritual path.
“Photography for me means priming my awareness of whatever I am living at the moment in this so fleeting life. Photography means capturing the ephemeral and expressing what is touching about the vulnerability of our human condition,” says Mandoki.
“The camera is an amazing device not only to enhance a moment and capture a significant speck within the impermanence of experience but also to share with others what I witness. Street photography is an eloquent way of showing the world who we are as Israelis. As philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, ‘What can be shown, cannot be said.’”
Mandoki’s photographs can be viewed on instagram.com/katyamandoki.
Her articles and lectures are found on katyamandoki.com.
Dr. Katya Mandoki
From Mexico City to Jerusalem, 1967