What is the significance of gambling within the Rotterdam immigrant community? And what is the relationship of that gambling game with taking the gamble by moving to a new country with all the uncertainties that come with it? This link was the subject of a new study by Gil and Moti. “With this we ask what it is like to live between two cultures; the conflict between the allurements of the west on the one hand, and traditional values ​​on the other. We want to test whether gambling is a way to escape this and other problems.” Immigrants themselves, Gil and Moti look at their own experiences and specifically wanted to look at social structures in Rotterdam, where gambling halls attract a relatively large number of migrants. In doing so, the duo wanted to try new research methods such as re-enactments and a theatrical approach to personal life stories, to deepen their documentary and activist art practice.

As an artist duo, Gil and Moti seem to abolish the boundaries between art and life. They started with a home gallery in the Witte de Withstraat and a public wedding performance with bridal bed in the town hall, since then they took an Arab lover taken as a symbolic solution to the Middle East conflict and volunteered in the West Bank, in both camps. The R&D committee considered the re-enactments a good step in a project that will add value to the city.

After theoretical research into migration, bonding and addiction, Gil and Moti decided to adjust their working method to exclude prejudice: they replaced planned conversations with more visits to gambling halls. They translated the aesthetics and social dynamics into a re-enactment and theatrical approach with a pub atmosphere, at other times into a more luxurious roulette table sculpture around an Antillean protagonist, and into two-dimensional work such as a painting after Cézannes card players. They showed these spatial and diverse settings in their solo exhibition at TENT in 2019, before traveling to Helsinki.