Despite the film’s stylization, Strauss is not interested in the fabrication of an event, but in the stylized documentation of an existing occurrence, as the cars’ cruising oscillates between a ceremonial ritual and a natural event. Driving an SUV is a charged act in itself: the SUV is, first and foremost, a coveted, prestigious, high-end product, a status symbol that places its owner in the exclusive community of the upper middle class. At the same time, throughout the world the SUV has become the symbol of trampling power, blind to the dangers it poses and the damages it causes to the ecological and human environments, a manifestation of aggressive, ostentatious lavishness.

In Strauss’s work the cars move in nonfunctional patterns as if performing a ritual guided by a hidden logic. Shot from a 90 degree angle, the ground becomes a smooth surface of sand on which the tires leave the traces of their ride. The power relations involved with the view from above – both physically, from the SUV drivers’ elevated vantage point in comparison to other drivers, and in economic-class terms – are reversed as the viewer is afforded a bird’s-eye view of the vehicle’s movement. The scale dissociates the cars from the everyday context, and they begin to resemble toy cars or insects. They move in a coordinated yet random manner, like cells splitting under a microscope.

Maayan Strauss (1982) was born in Israel. Lives and works in Tel Aviv

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