Outsiders once referred to the kibbutz as a “nature reserve,” a term its members adopted with pride — a place that preserved its values, balanced spirit and material life, connected nature and culture, and served as an example to emulate.

Today, places like their kibbutz risk becoming nature reserves — islands of cultivated nature that are shrinking as the creature called the cooperative kibbutz survives mostly in very affluent communities, where there is “enough” for everyone. Be’eri is one of the few remaining cooperative kibbutzim, where members work together to sustain a shared economy and receive equal living conditions. The revolutionary communal idea, founded on aspirations for social justice, balance between material and spiritual life, and mutual responsibility within the community, seems to exist more on the surface than at the core.

Ziva works. Using old brown wrapping paper, she builds empty stage sets, shells of objects that are landscapes — fragments of the environments she grew up in: a bench and a streetlamp, a sprinkler on the lawn, a rock garden with a public flower bed (a joint work by both artists). The public landscape is painted in plain white wall paint on shutters and walls — the simplest material. Her studio embraces worn-out relics carrying the scent of fifty years past. Her paintings, lyrical and beautiful, rustle in the heart. Ask Ziva about the pothos plants and other artificial vegetation in her works, and she will tell you that today there is no need to struggle to grow nature; one can buy cheap, durable replicas that will not fade from too much or too little watering and will remain green forever.

Sophie dreams, photographs, and digitally treats animals and plants — any “nature” around her — from her English infancy, through her childhood in the kibbutz and its surroundings, to her life as a mother raising children in today’s kibbutz. She is interested in the dawn outside the house, nocturnal animals and camouflage, animals from the London Zoo, butterflies from here and there. Her starting point is a deep, black void one can sink into; into it she inserts carefully rendered fragments of animals, Israeli flora (irises, cyclamen, fig leaves), kibbutz ornamentals (bauhinia trees, bougainvillea, calla lilies — in Be’eri they used to plant callas in the front gardens), and familiar kibbutz still-life objects. Like Ziva, she isolates images: the streetlamp, the curtains of the culture hall, a brutalist-style bench. Sometimes they use the same visual elements that Sophie photographs, each for her own work. She assembles collages — small islands, stories of identity and place.

She is drawn to, and draws from, the worlds of natural history museums and zoos — both institutions born in the nineteenth century that declared themselves cultural institutions and sources of knowledge, though they were, to a large extent, showcases of imperial colonialism. In zoos, animals are kept within painted environments, their cages framing them like pictures; in museums, animals are dead, catalogued, displayed timelessly. In both, the controlling hand of humanity is evident. Why were these institutions created, along with this aesthetic? And when did humans and animals lose the balance in their relationship?

Berger speaks against the separation between life, nature, and art. Today, he argues, “culture proceeds parallel to nature and is entirely separated from it. Even the sight of nature itself has shrunk into a commodity to be consumed.” Sophie believes that the historical loss for which zoos stand as a monument is irreversible in a culture shaped by capitalism, yet she does not dwell nostalgically on the past. Instead, she wonders about “the composition, the mixture, the present identity of my kibbutz; about processes of constructing or dismantling identity; about closed communities and conservatism; about hybrid creatures and the beauty and promise embedded in them.”

How does one create integration between the human inclination toward social life — perhaps toward social justice through equality and mutual responsibility (socialism) — and the inclination toward freedom, which ultimately gave rise to free competition, capitalism, and the reduction of human beings to equations of productivity, consumption, and utility? Both capitalism and socialism are products of the modern era. Perhaps humanity’s attitude toward animals, which today require preservation, foreshadows a future in which human culture, social structures, and even human communal life itself will require preservation.

Both Ziva and Sophie grow, from the personal and the private, branches of questions about nature and cultivation, and about the strange cooperative-capitalist way of life in which they live. Through kibbutz nature they ask: Is all this still alive? Perhaps on life support? Artificial? What still pulses with life, and what belongs to the past and is gone? Are they living the dream, or trapped in a “golden cage,” just before the kibbutz itself becomes a zoo — a place people come to see what no longer exists naturally, only as an exhibit of the past?

When IKEA sells plastic plants, kibbutz courtyards are covered with synthetic grass, and public buildings across the country are wrapped in artificial greenery, one may ask: what remains, a hundred years after its birth, of kibbutz nature and what it once symbolized?