In collaboration with the Heidelberg Police, the Heidelberg Fire brigades and volunteers Produced by the Heidelberg Theatre
Excerpt from a news report, RNF TV channel, Germany
In the early 1970s, following a violent student uprising and ongoing riots with the police, arrests and injuries, universities in Germany were declared as autonomous spaces where state officials cannot enter unconditionally and any performance of state violence is forbidden. This was understood as a way to guarantee academic freedom and the constitutional rights to freedom of expression and assembly. Since then till today, the police does not enter the university territory without the special and explicit invitation of the head of the university.
Public Movement proposed to perform this norm while suggesting a new day of training, questioning and stretching the actuality of laws but activating a new area for the public to perform.
Public Movement occupied the University’s main building and the University Square. Together with 16 policemen and 40 firefighters, Public Movement organized a public behavior drill, an examination in citizenship.
A screening process at the University entrance including physical checks and a seating plan, a procedure in a lecture hall, police questioning in the corridor, police arrests, a demonstration and an emergency evacuation drill led by the fire brigades. The action ended in street party on University Square.

Public Movement is a performative research body which investigates and stages political actions in public spaces. It studies and creates public choreographies, forms of social order, overt and covert rituals. Among Public Movement’s actions in the past and in the future: manifestations of presence, fictional acts of hatred, new folk dances, synchronised procedures of movement, spectacles, marches, inventing and reenacting moments in the life of individuals, communities, social institutions, peoples, states, and of humanity.

In the last six years, Public Movement has explored the regulations, forces, agents, and policies, formations of identity and systems of ritual which govern the dynamics of public life and public space. The Movement was founded in November 2006 by Omer Krieger and Dana Yahalomi, the later assumed sole leadership in 2011.

Public Movement has taken responsibility for the following actions: “Accident” (2006), “The Israel Museum” (2007), “Also Thus!” (Acco, 2007), “Rally” (Rabin Square, 2007), “Operation Free Holon”, “Change of Guard (With Dani Karavan, Tel-Aviv Museum of Art), “Public Movement House” (2008), “Spring in Warsaw” (2009), “Performing Politics for Germany” (2010), “University Exercise” (Heidelberg, 2010), “Positions” (NY, 6.11.11, Performa), “SALONS: Birthright Palestine?” (New Museum, New York, 2012), Rebranding European Muslims (Berlin Biennial 2012, Steirischer Herbst 2012), Debriefing Session (Baltic Circle, Helsinki), Honor Guard (Asian Art Biennial, Taipei 2013) and “The Reenactment of the Mount Herzl Terrorist Attack” (Upcoming).

Public Movement, leader of action: Omer Krieger, Dana Yahalomi
Public Movement members: Hagar Ophir, Luciana Kaplon, Gali Libraider, Saar Szekely
Production and dramaturgy: Jan Linders, Jenny Fluegge

Bread and Roses is an art sale exhibition in support of the Women and Work project, established by the Workers Advice Center (WAC). This social project focuses on lifting Arab women in Israel out of poverty by helping them find employment. Artists active with WAC – painters, photographers and filmmakers – run this project of solidarity which draws hundreds of leading artists to participate.
Only 22% of Arab women participate in the workforce, compared to 60% of Jewish women. For this reason, some 60% of Arab families live under the poverty line. This amounts to some 320,000 Arab women outside the workforce, and meanwhile the economic and social crisis among Israeli Arabs deepens.
WAC’s Women and Work project has been active since 2005 opening up jobs for Arab women in agriculture, a branch in which most jobs are located close to their homes. These women cry out for this minimum-wage work, but the farmers prefer migrant labor, which is even cheaper and more easily exploited – and in this they have the cooperation of manpower agencies and the government’s support.
Over the years, Bread and Roses has raised some 3 million shekels for the Women and Work project. Moreover, the hundreds of artists who participate in the exhibition increase its influence, which is changing public opinion and thus also the opinion of decision-makers regarding the need to solve the problem of unemployment among Arab women.
The social solidarity developing between Jewish artists and Arab workers on the basis of common economic interests brings hope to the exhibition participants, to the viewers and to the purchasers of the art being exhibited. This hope is Bread and Roses’ open secret, as it works to create a society of equality and social justice so different from the reality of Israel today.
Bread and Roses – Dani Ben Simhon, Sharon Lior, Yoav Tamir, Erez Wagner, Nir Nader
Women and Work – Wafa Tayara, Michal Schwarz, Hanan Manadreh, Roni Ben Efrat, Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka, Hadas Lahav, Assaf Adiv, Tzipora Friedman
Photography –Erez Harodi, Films: Look at Us – Shiri Wilk; This is Your Last Day – Jonathan Ben Efrat, Graphic design and info-graphics – Yanay Sapir, Logo – Yuval Saar, Lahav Halevi

The project “Your Son will Amount to Nothing” took place in Jesse Cohen neighborhood over a two-year period, in collaboration with The Israeli Center for Digital Art, and was exhibited as a solo exhibition in November 2012. Throughout the project, television cases (some of which are featured in the current installation) were scattered around the neighborhood, simultaneously transmitting and receiving. A chance encounter with Vered Levanon-Parante, a local artist who teaches children in the neighborhood, formed the basis from which emerged the dialogue between Meir Tati and different artists, each recounting the story of a journey: Levanon-Parante, the granddaughter of painter Mordechai Levanon, “wounds the canvas,” as she puts it, in order to humanize it so that it will “carry my life’s burdens;” Rosenberg’s artistic career evolved from her activity in the neighborhood and involvement with the neighborhood renewal project; while Genadhi (Gdalia) Zimmel delineates a fascinating journey, which starts in the city of Lviv in the western Ukraine, continues with the Lenin Award for outstanding services rendered to the state, and ends in Jesse Cohen.
The input-output cases are transported from the public spaces of the neighborhood to the artists’ work areas, documenting them over several weeks. At the end of the process, Tati curated a solo exhibition of each of the artists, held in a vacant store at the commercial center, a space which The Israeli Center for Digital Art rents for its activity in the neighborhood. It is not the first time that this store was transformed into an exhibition venue, but it is the first time that the artists featured in it are the neighborhood’s residents.
Participating artists:
Vered Levanon-Parante is a painter and a painting instructor at the Holon Lazarus Community Center. Her studio is located in her mother’s home, a few streets distance from Jesse Cohen neighborhood. She is the granddaughter of painter Mordechai Levanon, whose paintings are still hanging on the walls of the house, and serve as one of Vered’s first sources of inspiration. The drawings, made in pencil and marker on paper, expose rich imagery which draws on the artist’s own private world. The images include family members – her son, husband and sister, and the domestic environment – the bedroom, living room etc. In the drawings, the mundane world is interwoven with dreamlike worlds – clouds and wings in space, floating rooms and more. All of these make Vered’s drawings a rich and fascinating space, in which every look will uncover new details. Vered Levanon-Parante graduated from The Avni Institute and the Bat Yam Art Institute, and exhibited in several venues in Israel including The Tel Aviv Artists House, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Efrat Gallery, Holon Theater, Light House Gallery, Ribak Museum.
Mimi Rosenberg is a painter, sculptor, and member of Color in Nature artists group. She taught painting at different institutions and community centers for many years, and served as a youth counselor in art camps of the Jewish Agency. Was honored as Woman of the Year of the city of Holon, and received the international Lions Award. One of the founding members of The Painters and Sculptors Association. Studied painting with the painters Zvi Tadmor, Israel Hershberg, Yair Garbuz, Gideon Ofrat. Her works were featured in many exhibitions, and her sculptures are on display throughout the city of Holon.
Genadhi (Gdalia) Zimmel graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in The Ukraine. In addition to being a sculptor and an artist, he is also an educator who taught dozens of pupils in Jaffa and Holon. For Gdalia, wood art is not only the act of sculpting and carving, it is also the vehicle through which children and youths can channel their energies, and find a new interest outside the bounds of the neighborhood. To this day, Gdalia comes across former pupils whom wood sculpting helped steer away from negative circles, and guided towards new avenues.

Acknowledgments: The Israeli Center for Digital Art , Vered Levanon-Parante, Mimi Rosenberg, Genadhi (Gdalia) Zimmel, Yair Reshef, Dina Yakerson

For his contribution to Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, artist Ai Weiwei brought to town 1,001 residents of China during the well-known art fair. With $4.14 million from funding sources such as Documenta’s sponsors, three Swiss foundations, as well as the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ai arranged all aspects of travel. He paid for airfare, processed visa applications, refurbished an old textile mill into a temporary hostel, transported Chinese chefs to cook meals, designed travel items such as clothing and luggage, and organized tours of Kassel’s landmarks. He also installed 1,001 empty antique chairs throughout the exhibition pavilion to represent the Chinese participants’ presence in Kassel. His visitors acted as both tourists and subjects of his art—viewers of a foreign culture, as well as signs of another.

Within three days of advertising the free trip on his blog, Ai received 3,000 applications. He privileged those with limited resources or travel restrictions; for example, women from a farming village, who lacked proper identity cards, were able to obtain government-issued travel documents for the first time. Other participants included laid-off workers, police officers, children, street vendors, students, farmers, and artists. They arrived en masse, in groups of 200. However, Ai solicited their individual voices through filmed interviews with each traveler, and also a lengthy questionnaire—99 questions—that focused on personal histories, desires, and fantasies.

Kassel is best known as home to the Brothers Grimm, famed collectors of fables from the region. Ai named his project Fairytale in reference to their tales, and as a nod to the spirit of the trip, which likely felt mythical to many of the tourists, who had perhaps never before dreamed of leaving China.
 

A national highway runs through Fuentes de Ebro, yet the small, ordinary Spanish village rarely receives visitors. In order to draw attention to the area, Lara Almarcegui and Begoña Movellán converted the local train station, which had been abandoned for 20 years, into a free hotel for one week. “The town is not beautiful, and not the kind of village people would likely visit,” Almarcegui says. “So, I thought it would be a kind of extreme gesture to propose that people spend a week there.”

She used $400 from a small grant to renovate the concrete, two-story building, which with high ceilings and tiled flooring was an apt candidate for use as a hotel. Almacegui and Movellán painted the interior walls, brought in furniture donated by the town’s residents, installed electricity and plumbing, and advertised the repurposed station in the neighboring city of Zaragoza. Though the hotel was completely booked during the project’s run, the effort remained somewhat clandestine, since Almarcegui originally received permission from railway officials to use the station as an exhibition venue, not a residential facility. “They never would have let me create a free hotel, especially since there was no museum” backing the project, she says. “So the event was a secret among the guests. I even asked them to hide their luggage—I was so afraid.” Fuentes de Ebro residents continue to use the building as a meeting and event space.

Almarcegui lives in Rotterdam. In preparation for Hotel Fuentes de Ebro, she spent one month in Spain researching unused architectural spaces that offer potential solutions to housing and urban dilemmas. Her work often explores different methods for forming relationships to communities, usually though long-term research, interviewing residents, investigating new possibilities for aging infrastructure.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla placed 12 five-foot columns of chalk in public squares in Lima, Paris, and New York, ephemeral public monuments that would crumble and dissolve over time into smaller pieces and pools of liquid. The artists then invited people to use the fallen pieces of chalk to write messages on the ground, doodle, or express themselves in any fashion they chose, thereby transforming the material decay into a fleeting opportunity for creative possibilities. In Lima, Allora and Caldazilla placed the chalk columns directly in front of government offices, which incited passersby to convert the nearby ground into a large blackboard overflowing with messages intended to critique the state. This activity evolved into an impromptu, peaceful protest as civil servants gathered in the square, waving banners and hoisting posters above their shoulders. Eventually, military officers, who were standing by in shields and helmets, confiscated the chalk, and washed away the incendiary political statements.

Puerto Rico-based Allora and Caldzadilla represented the United States in 2011 Venice Biennale—the first performance artists, and artists collaborative, to do so. Since the late 1990s, the artists have used sculpture, performance, and video to transform common objects into politicized tools. Their projects often explore the act of mark making—how temporary actions can yield permanent effects.

On August 2012 members of the art-activist group Alshaab alsori aref tarekh (“Syrian people know their way”) were awarded the Golden Nica in the Austrian Prix Ars Electronica’s Digital Communities category for their use of the Internet and social media as a vehicle for disseminating posters calling for liberation from the shackles of oppression in their country.
The exhibition “Syrian People Know their Way”, first held at the Research Gallery of the Master’s Program in Integrated Design at HIT (Holon Institute of Technology) on February – March 2013, features posters designed by the group, conveying the devastating tragedy of the Syrian people whose country is the arena of a bloody civil war. The exhibition offered a look at the political situation in Syria during the first months of the struggle outside the prism of hegemonic values of the Western world, and through the voices of the protestors themselves. These posters reflect a polyphonic discourse that was silenced, in which the social and political framework in Syria disintegrates and returns to its pre-state condition. They expose the ideological struggles of the Syrian opposition movements, and demonstrate how their employment of means of digital distribution produces a new type of propaganda, one that has no cohesive and focused message, but rather fluid and ambiguous messages. More than the exhibition aims to shed light on the events in Syria, it takes an ironic stand towards our blind spot in relation to these events.
The exhibition was curated by Dr. Yael Eilat John – Essen
The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue, published in collaboration with Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University and edited by Dr. Dror K. Levi, academic director of the gallery and Head of the Master’s Program, and Yael Eylat Van-Essen, the exhibition curator. It features articles that examine the posters in the various contexts of iconography, culture, politics, and propaganda; the mechanisms of their production and dissemination; and the place of calligraphy in Islam, in which like in Judaism “the written word is the message.” Contributors: Dr. Dror K. Levi, Professor Eyal Zisser , Dr. Yael Eylat Van-Essen, Dr. Nir Boms , Dr. Yehudit Shaflan, and Dr. Alon Fragman .

When former DJ Nick Szuberla launched the only hip-hop radio program in the Appalachian region, inmates from the two neighboring SuperMax prisons began writing him letters, recounting the racism and human rights violations they suffered while incarcerated. He responded by initiating an on-air chess game with the prisoners, a simple gesture that acknowledged, and provided brief respite from, their hardships. Szuberla soon began broadcasting the voices of prisoners themselves via a variety of artistic projects, including poetry segments, rap sessions, and collaborations between hip-hip artists and local mountain musicians. In one episode of the show, an imprisoned man expresses, in verse, a long overdue phone call to his brother, shortly after his mother’s passing. In another, titled Calls from Home, a mother updates her incarcerated son on family events and describes daily activities like her morning routine.

The radio show has since expanded into Thousand Kites, a “national dialogue project” and non-profit organization based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, that advocates nationally for prison reform, primarily by creating transparency around injustices that occur within the system. Szuberla sits at the helm of the organization, whose name is derived from the phrase “to shoot a kite,” which in prison slang means to send a message. At the heart of the Thousand Kites project is a vast website that features the stories of prisoners, their families, activists, and artists in the form of video and radio programs, blogs, and letter-writing campaigns. The site also includes news clips, press releases about legislative changes, and accessible educational activities such as “We Can’t Pay the Bill,” which outlines the rising costs of maintaining prisons.

Thousand Kites operates under the 40-year-old umbrella non-profit Appalshop, which supports regional arts in the Appalachian region, documents local traditions, and works to abolish stereotypes of the area’s residents.

On the 100th anniversary of the first Russian Revolution, collective Chto Delat? (What is to Be Done?) organized activists in protest of contemporary labor inequities on the square at Narva Gate in St. Petersburg, the site of the original uprising in 1905. In this contemporary staging, Chto Delat? invited low-income workers who normally wear sandwich boards advertising local businesses to participate by wearing new boards bearing language from Bertolt Brecht’s poem, “In Praise of Dialectics” as well as a series of questions. “Are you being exploited? Are you exploiting somebody? Is exploitation inevitable?” The first Russian Revolution was a violent and failed attempt to dislodge government; Angry Sandwich People aimed to reflect on the political implications of this failure.

Chto Delat?, which takes its name from Vladimir Lenin’s historic political pamphlet, consists of poets, artists, philosophers, singers, set designers, critics, and writers who appropriate the iconography and terminology of Communism in their work. They work as “art soviets,” inspired by the councils formed in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Relying heavily on political and artistic theory, Chto Delat? explores the idea of “participatory democracy,” and the history of the word “solidarity,” through exhibitions, artworks, and projects in public space.

As organizers of Complaints Choir, Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen have heard it all: “My dreams are boring.” “My grandmother is a racist.” “My neighbor organizes Hungarian folk dances above my bedroom.” “I am fat and lazy and half-old.” Since 2005, the artists, who live in Helsinki, Finland, have invited people to sing their gripes in unison, in public, and online. The process is simple. First, invite others. Then, find a good musician. Once complaints are collected, written in verse, and rehearsed, participants are asked to record a public performance and submit it to the Complaints Choir website, a warehouse for songs with submissions from Japan to Chicago. Complaints include the overtly political—for example, social injustices in a small, Brazilian town—to the deeply personal, like having too much sex on the brain. But “the private, the personal, can be very political,” Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen write on their website. “‘I have too much time!’ can be seen as a personal tragedy, but also points to a major defect in capitalistic society, which sidelines people because they are of no use in the production cycle.” In Cairo, Egypt, a recent complaints choir drew so much interest and such large crowds, that it evolved into the “Choir Project,” an ongoing, local version that generates reflections and concerns about current political conditions in the region.

Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen make work that often documents daily experiences, such as on-the-job mishaps, and doctor-patient relationships. The artists first got the idea for Complaints Choir while living in Finland, where the word for those who complain literally translates to “complaint choir.” They compiled their first choir in Birmingham, England, with the help of two arts organizations; since then, over seventy choirs have formed around the world.

Basurama is a laboratory for considering waste and its reuse launched in 2001 by a group of students at the Madrid School of Architecture. Since then, the group—who now work as professional architects, designers, and other urban planners—has collaborated with communities to explore what trash, and how we treat it, can reveal about the way we consider the world. The group’s work often exists in the form of workshops, talks, and other discussion forums. But central to Basurama’s practice is the actual collection of detritus, and rebuilding of public spaces, using leftover material. For example, in Lima, Basurama rehabilitated an abandoned railway by inviting local artists and other community members to create an amusement park along the tracks. They also enlisted school children in Miami to create musical instruments out of old car parts.

Such activities began in 2008 with the series Residuos Urbanos Solidos (Urban Solid Waste), projects Basurama has initiated in numerous cities globally. In the Suf refugee camp in Jerash, Jordan, the group worked with Palestinian refugees to build a children’s playground and a shaded area for recreation. And in Buenos Aires, discarded cardboard was used to fashion a makeshift skate park. “We find gaps in these processes of production,” Basurama says, “that not only raise questions about the way we manage our resources but also about the way we think, we work, we perceive reality.”

Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency is a Palestinian art and architecture collective and a residency program based in Beit Sahour, Palestine. Organized by architects Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal Weizman, DAAR examines the possible re-usage of existing architecture in occupied territories—a process they refer to as “Revolving Door Occupancy.”

In 2006, the Israeli army evacuated Oush Grab (literally translated as “The Crow’s Nest”), a hilltop military site at the edge of Beit Sahour, Bethlehem, from which colonial regimes had governed Palestine for centuries. When Israeli settlers took control of the abandoned building, Decolonized Architecture Art Residency (DAAR), along with other Palestinian and international activists, reclaimed Oush Grab as public space and initiated plans to convert it into a multiuse park. To generate interest as well as support for the plan, DAAR hosted bingo games, film screenings, prayer sessions, and tours of the land with the help of NGOs and the local municipality. The Israeli settlers retaliated by marking the old structure with graffiti, which DAAR responded to by organizing community cleanup measures. In addition, after discovering that same hilltop was also a roosting ground for thousands of migrating birds, DAAR punctured the structure with holes in order to transform it into both an observatory and a nesting place.

Have you ever wondered what happens when the chicken actually does cross the road? According to the Brazilian collective BijaRi, people react in vastly different ways depending on their relative economic and cultural positions. In 2001, BijaRi let a chicken run loose in two São Paulo shopping districts—first near the luxury Iguatemi shopping mall and then in the adjacent Largo da Batata, a bus stop and market generally frequented by lower income residents—and filmed the public’s reactions. In the Iguatemi mall, security guards immediately treated the chicken as a criminal suspect (actually referring to it as a “suspicious entity”), carefully scrutinized its behavior, and quickly removed the animal from the property. Meanwhile, patrons of Largo da Batata, likewise suspicious, reacted to the chicken in a much less orderly fashion. They spoke to the chicken reproachfully as if it were a person, followed it en masse, and ultimately allowed the bird to remain on the premises. The project was presented in the form of video documentation at the Havana Biennial in 2003.

BijaRi, who work as architects, artists, and activists, explore whether “so-called public spaces are truly accessible to all,” says member Mauricio Brandão. “We are interested in the way some of these spaces become almost privatized due to aesthetic, economic, social, and behavioral patterns.” They stage confrontational actions and public performances that foster dissent, and present provocative images in urban spaces, including street signs, poster campaigns, and large-scale video projections. Projects such as Transverse Reality aim to disturb the regular flow of life by eliciting unexpected reactions from the public.

In 1991, five Iranian artists, Farid Jahangir and Sassan Nassiri, Bita Fayyazi, Ata Hasheminejad, and Khosrow Hassanzedeh, took over an abandoned house in Tehran, Iran, and used it as both studio space and found object—a place to collaborate, and also explore the physical and political meaning of urban architectural detritus. They spent two months creating various projects in the house, including paintings, installations, and sculptures. An installation of wallpaper peeled away from the walls in long strips, broken vases spilled over countertops and out of cabinets, and atmospheric projections of images like El Greco’s Burial of Count Orgaz filled the relatively spare rooms of the house.

At the end of the two-month period, they opened the project to the public, as well as other artist collaborators. During the artists stay, the house maintained its status as abandoned property—no effort to renovate it occurred— while it also evolved into an active, lived space. After the run of the show, the artists demolished the house, carrying out its original, intended fate.

For eleven years, Helena Producciones’ Festival de Performance de Cali played a key role in the cultural life of Cali, Colombia, a city with a notable shortage of resources and support networks for the arts. The festival provided a forum for both emerging and established international artists to create performances that were interactive and politically motivated, and defied traditional boundaries between artist and audience. Examples of past performances include Spanish artist Santiago Sierra’s installation of an enormous American flag on the wall of the Tertulia Museum; French artist Pierre Pinoncelli’s amputation of his pinkie finger in protest of the kidnapping of 2002 presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt; and a concert by Las Malas Amistades, a Casiotone art school band whose independently produced CDs have attained cult status among college students. Artists were invited to participate by invitation and through an open call for submissions. The five-day festival would also include workshops, street interventions, and talks held in various cultural centers throughout the city—from public plazas to modest artist-run spaces.

Helena Producciones is a non-profit, multidisciplinary collective that expands definitions of visual art by organizing events that promote local culture and community-initiated activism. The collective, which includes artists Wilson Díaz, Ana María Millán, Andrés Sandoval, Claudia Patricia Sarria, and Juan David Medina, often offers institutional critique through its work, as well as perspectives on local conditions, alternative to the routine social and economic conflict endemic in Colombia. The collective was also responsible for Loop, a semi-weekly television program that aired in Cali from 2000-2001 and mimicked the variety show format in order to report on the activities of local artists and punk bands.

For one afternoon in 1994, two hundred and twenty high school students in Oakland, California, sat in parked cars on a rooftop garage and talked to each other about violence, sex, gender, family, and race. The teens spoke candidly, without any kind of script, while an audience of nearly one thousand people—including numerous reporters and camera crews—walked from car to car, leaning in and bending over, to hear their conversations through rolled-down windows. The resulting footage of the performance, called The Roof Is On Fire, was aired locally on multiple networks and nationally on CNN.

Oakland teens were already accustomed to receiving media attention, though largely through negative portrayals of young people involved in riots, violence, and conflicts with police. This event, however, which was organized by artist Suzanne Lacy in conjunction with TEAM (a group of teens, educators, artists, and media workers), was designed as a positive media spectacle, with young people depicted as citizens rather than liabilities. For five months, Lacy met weekly with teachers and teens, including those from a nearby probation program, to discuss issues important to them, and to craft a message for civic leaders about the role of young people in Oakland’s future. The Roof Is On Fire reflected the crux of those discussions, as well as Lacy’s decades-long mission to counter misleading media images with empowered, community-oriented actions. Since the 1970s, she has created performances that offer alternative narratives and interpretations of news coverage. For example, In Mourning and In Rage presented a public ritual on the steps of Los Angeles’ City Hall in response to coverage of the murders of 10 women in December 1977. While the stories focused on the random nature of the violence, Lacy’s collaborative performance was a call to action, and reframing of the killing spree from a feminist perspective.

Since the 1800s, working-class Blacks in New Orleans paid tribute to Native Americans who aided escaped slaves on their routes to safety by “masking Indian”: building and donning elaborate costumes for Mardi Gras, fashioned from layers upon layers of feathers, beads, sequins, and billowing fabrics dyed in energetic colors. For 52 years, Allison “Tootie” Montana, a construction worker and chief of the chief of these Mardi Gras Indians, lead the parade: His signature, three-dimensional geometric designs often weighed hundreds of pounds, costs thousands of dollars, and earned him a National Endowments for the Arts grant, and was the subject of feature-length documentary. On July 10, 2005, thousands New Orleans residents gathered to march in his funeral procession, out of respect for his art, and his advocacy for this community.

Montana was a long-time, outspoken advocate for Mardi Gras Indians, who often faced discrimination from local law enforcement. On the night of his death, he addressed the City Council, along with other chiefs, to protest police brutality, as well as efforts to squash Mardi Gras Indian parades and other public gatherings. Moments later he collapsed on the floor, and was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead of a heart attack. His funeral procession, which drew both non-Indians and Indians, was one of the largest to trickle down the well-known parade route from the church to the cemetery; participants beat tambourines, chanted, and moved like rhythmic clouds of aqua, orange, red, and yellow smoke.

One Saturday morning in 2003, the mayor of a small, Czechoslovakian village, Ponetovice, broadcast a message to all 350 residents: He asked them to go shopping—at the same time. For the rest of the day, the people continued to synchronize their routine according to a schedule that was posted on the village bulletin board. They simultaneously opened windows, swept porches, ate dumplings, met for beers, and finally all retired to bed at 10 pm. Though the regimen, created by Katerina Šedá, was strict, members of the community felt liberated by the shared activities, an experience many Europeans perhaps associated—somewhat nostalgically—with their lives before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.

Šedá, who lives and works in Brno, named the project after a common saying in Czech provinces: “There is nothing there.” “They feel that everything important happens in cities or somewhere beyond our borders,” Šedá has said. For one year, she conducted interviews, distributed surveys, and observed life in the village, which was once the site of major military battles in the 19th century, but was now largely disconnected from the socio-political fabric of Europe.

Šedá often asks her projects’ participants to recount personal information that she then re-presents in order to encourage new reflection on what their lives can mean. When the artist’s grandmother fell into a deep depression after her husband’s death, refusing to leave her armchair to perform even basic, hygienic tasks, Šedá encouraged the elderly woman to draw, from memory, every item sold in the hardware store where she worked as a bookkeeper for 30 years. The activity, which yielded hundreds of images, allowed Šedá’s grandmother to engage with the past, in order to re-enter her life in the present. Similarly, by performing their minute, daily tasks en masse, Ponetovice residents were empowered to reconsider the larger terms of their citizenship.

The houses of Naranjito, located outside of San Juan, Puerto Rico, follow the contour of the mountain beneath them, rising and falling along the ridges. This is the first thing Chemi Rosado-Seijo noticed from the foot of the hillside; not the boarded windows or trash-lined streets—signs of a declining economy in what was once a thriving community founded by coffee-plantation workers. And so, in an effort to draw attention to the uniquely organic shape of this small town—and to instill a sense of civic pride among residents who were increasingly disillusioned with their economic situation—he began to paint all of Naranjito’s houses green.

During the project, Rosado-Seijo asked homeowners for permission to paint their homes a shade of green of their choosing. Many declined at first, primarily because the color is associated with the independistas, a local group that sought succession from the United States. But gradually, as the color popped out of the terrain and complemented the hues of the surrounding trees, they began to agree on condition that he also repaint other parts of the property such as stoops and fences in different colors. He enlisted local youth to help him paint, and held workshops, conferences and other events that brought positive press coverage to a community inundated daily with reports of the endemic unemployment and crime that had characterized the village.

Throughout his practice, Rosado-Seijo transforms public perception by presenting new approaches to the urban experience. In 2005, he was commissioned by the New York-based Art in General to explore Manhattan on skateboard. He then created a map of the best skate sites and routes he located during his travels; his 15-foot diagram proposed an alternate transportation option as well as a new aesthetic understanding of the city. El Cerro was presented at the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

In 1993, artist Rick Lowe purchased a row of abandoned shotgun-style houses in Houston, Texas’, Northern Third Ward district, a low-income African-American neighborhood that was slotted for demolition. He galvanized hundreds of volunteers to help preserve the buildings, first by sweeping streets, rebuilding facades, and renovating the old housing’s interiors. Then, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and private foundations, the growing group of activists transformed the blight-ridden strip into a vibrant campus that hosts visiting artists, galleries, a park, commercial spaces, gardens, and as well as subsidized housing for young mothers, ages 18-26, looking to get back on their feet. Called Project Row Houses, the effort has restored the architecture and history of the community, while providing essential social services to residents. Now functioning as a non-profit organization, the project continues to be emblematic of long-term, community-engaged programs, and has been exhibited around in world in museums, and other art venues.

Since Project Row Houses’ inception, Lowe—the 2010 recipient of Creative Time’s Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change—has privileged art as a catalyst for change, a word that he has considered carefully: “It used to be that you could assume a progressive agenda when you heard the word ‘change,’” he says. “But language is shifting. Clarity is missing.” The project first took root after a conversation he had with a high school student who questioned the efficacy of making art objects in the quest for social justice. Inspired, Lowe looked to the work of artist John Biggers, who believed that art holds the capacity to uplift tangible social conditions, before intervening in the Northern Third Ward.

Project Row Houses has grown from 22 houses to 40, and includes exhibition spaces, a literary center, a multimedia performance art space, offices, low-income housing, and other amenities. In 2003, the organization established the Row House Community Development Corporation, a low-income rental-housing agency.

“What I want to be able to do is change the lives of people with the same materials they deal with every day,” says artist Vik Muniz in Wasteland, a documentary film that follows the production of his photographic series Pictures of Garbage. In 2008, Muniz traveled to Brazil, where he was born and raised, to work with garbage pickers from Jardim Gramacho, a 321-acre, open-air dump, the largest in South America, located just outside of Rio. An informal and marginalized labor source, these workers scavenge the garbage that arrives daily, searching for recyclable items to sell. Muniz enlisted them to help him design, and then pose for, massive portraits composed of the collected detritus. The resulting works conjure classical portraiture in which his collaborators are elevated to mythical status amid the trash that looks deceptively like precious material, or thick, glimmering paint.

Muniz lifted more than just the workers’ image through his art. He paid all participants for their time and contributed materials. He also auctioned off the works, and donated his share of the sales to the Garbage Pickers Association of Jardim Gramacho, the workers’ representative body. Most significantly, he continued to collaborate with them to help enact a formal recycling program in Brazil, bring awareness of their labor to a wider public, and instill a sense of dignity in this historically underrepresented community. In the past few years, plans to close Jardim Gramacho—and implement the first widespread, national recycling program in the country—have surfaced.

Pictures of Garbage typifies of much of Muniz’s work—near trompe l’oeil in his use of lay materials from syrup to peanut butter to figurines. To produce these photographs, which have been exhibited globally, he spent two years at the landfill. Through his practice, the Brooklyn-based artist has supported non-profit organizations in Brazil, particularly those that offer training and education to underserved children.

Chiang Mai’s Warorot Market, which dates back to the 19th century, is best characterized by the word “epic”: The densely packed stalls and stores feature inexhaustible rows of wares, from vegetables and chickens to brightly dyed textiles and plastic knick-knacks. Likewise, the market’s population has become an equally diverse cross-section of religious and ethnic identities over the years. Artist Navin Rawanchaikul grew up working in his family’s fabric store amid the complex, cultural mélange. To celebrate the market’s centennial anniversary, he organized an arts festival, called Mahākād, inspired by the market’s history, that included site-specific installations and events as well as two-dimensional works such as historical photographs; portraits of its current inhabitants; and a vast, monochromatic mural depicting 200 community members. In reference to the international scope of the market, visitors were given maps of the space, and leaflets designed to look like “passports,” which could be stamped at each art station. After receiving ten stamps, visitors were eligible to receive a free magazine that recounts Mahākād’s history. Directed by Rawanchaikul’s Navin Production Studio, and in collaboration with several community groups, the festival’s accompanying activities included workshops, a tour of the project sites led by Rawanchaikul and a panel discussion about community engagement in contemporary art practices. The festival’s title references the ancient Indian text Mahābhārata—a complex, network of characters and plots that reflects the interwoven relationships embedded in the market.

Rawanchaikul uses the realm of the everyday as both the subject and venue of his art. He often creates his work under the banner of Navin Production Co., Ltd., his production company that he founded in 1994 and launched by producing bottled, polluted water from a canal in Chiang Mai. In 1995, he initiated “Navin Gallery Bangkok,” his taxicab-turned-mobile art gallery.

In April 2010, a shocking video of an American helicopter firing upon a group of Iraqi journalists on the ground in Bagdad stunned mainstream media and the diplomatic world, and inspired a global debate about the relationship between news outlets and the governments they report on. The video, titled Collateral Murder, was released by WikiLeaks, a whistle-blowing non-profit organization that since its inception has aimed to shine light on the operations of governments and corporations around the world. Founded by former computer hacker Julian Assange, as well as a group of technologists, dissidents and activists, WikiLeaks is guided by the premise that democracy works best when citizens are aware of state and military operations, and can hold governments accountable to their actions.

Historically, large media groups consult with government sources before releasing potentially sensitive information, in order to leverage these relationships for greater access to information. WikiLeaks has challenged this process by eschewing such negotiations and releasing classified memos, diplomatic cables, videos, and other materials directly to the public via its website. “Publishing improves transparency, and this transparency creates a better society for all people,” states WikiLeaks’ mission. “Better scrutiny leads to reduced corruption and stronger democracies in all society’s institutions, including government, corporations and other organizations. A healthy, vibrant, and inquisitive journalistic media plays a vital role in achieving these goals. We are part of that media.” WikiLeaks’ critics, with the U.S. government at the helm, have countered that the organization’s practices have endangered military and intelligence personnel as well as their civilian sources.

WikiLeaks operates with a small all-volunteer staff as well as a network of 800 to 1,000 experts who advise on issues such as encryption, vetting information, and programming. Its material is housed on servers around the globe—outside of the jurisdiction of any single institution or government.

Women on Waves rocked the boat well before setting sail in 2001. Lead by physician Rebecca Gomperts, this women’s healthcare advocacy group aimed to provide abortion services in countries where the procedure is illegal. They built a seafaring abortion clinic registered in The Netherlands, anchored it 12 miles away from harbors in international waters, where they could operate under Dutch law, and attempted to safely bring women on board. Yet, media buzz resulted in strong resistance—such as military intervention as they approached Portugal, and pelts from fake blood and eggs in Poland. No surgical abortions were performed at sea, and only fifty women received abortions of any kind on the vessel. “But the boat created a lot of controversy, which has always been important to the campaign,” says Kinja Manders, project manager for Women on Waves. “Our goal has always been to stir public debate, and to send the message that abortion is not simply a public health issue—it’s a social justice issue.”

In 2010, Mexico celebrated the bicentennial of its independence movement, fostering a range of events and activities intended to, according the country’s bicentennial homepage, “revive the values and ideals that shaped the nation.” In anticipation of the bicentennial events, nine young people, from a range of disciplines, committed to the sharing of ideas and creation of an open community founded Pase Usted in 2008.

The Mexico City-based nonprofit group promotes civic change and development through conferences that emphasize open dialogue and community building. Bringing together experts in various fields—civic engineering, architecture, art, city planning, design—the platform is unified by a shared agenda to address the most pressing needs facing the city. While community outreach is essential to each project, Pase Usted often enlists specialists to offer solutions where other options fail. While their activities vary—ranging from workshops to salons to exhibitions to public interventions—Pase Usted operates as an open source network, providing individuals with the technological tools needed to promote their ideas.

On April 23, 2011, Pase Usted, represented by Jorge Munguia, participated in a “Conversation on Useful Art,” in Corona, Queens, hosted by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera at the headquarters of her project, Immigrant Movement International. The event, which also included artists Rick Lowe, Mel Chin, and Not An Alternative, asked participants to share their work in the field of so-called “Useful Art.” Pase Usted presented their work in Mexico City, focusing on the project “Genera,” for which they made a “call for entries” to anyone with ideas on how to better the quality of life in Mexico City. The ten-week program gives funding to ten selected projects as a way of giving individual people the resources to actualize their ideas.

La Commune (Paris, 1871) is a 375-minute docudrama reconstructing the events of the Paris Commune in its 1871 struggle against the Versaillais French forces. The filming took place in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of Paris that was outfitted to resemble the 11th Arrondissement, one of the poorest working-class districts at the time of the Commune’s suppression and the scene of some of the conflict’s bloodiest fighting.

The cast included 220 people from Paris and the provinces, most of them lacking prior acting experience. People with conservative political views were deliberately recruited to act in roles opposed to the Commune. The cast members were encouraged to do their own research into the historical events, as well as to improvise and to discuss the events during the filming process. Even after the shooting was over, the cast’s involvement with its ideas continued in different ways; for example, a weekend of public talks organized by one of the actors, featuring presentations and debates on the Paris Commune.

The film challenges existing notions of documentary film, as well as the notions of “neutrality” and “objectivity” so beloved by the mass media today. The film is not intended as an apologia on behalf of the Paris Commune. But at the same time, it attempts to show that the Paris Commune, for all its human frailty, its internal conflicts and its blundering, was an event of major importance, not least because of the way in which its leading reformers tried to work with social process, by a direct involvement with the community and its needs. For Watkins, to make a film is to question his own work as a filmmaker. La Commune represents an uncompromising challenge to modern media and a penetrating critique.

Cybermohalla Ensemble is a collective of practitioners and writers that emerged from the project called Cybermohalla, a network of dispersed labs for experimentation and exploration among young people in different neighborhoods of Delhi. Cybermohalla was launched in 2001 by two Delhi-based think tanks, Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education and Sarai-CSDS. Over the years, the collective has produced a very wide range of materials, practices, works and structures. Their work has circulated and been shown in online journals, radio broadcasts, publications, neighborhood gatherings, contemporary and new media art exhibitions. Their significant publication includes Bahurupiya Shehr and Trickster City. Their latest publication, in collaboration with Frankfurt-based architects Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Muller, a consolidation of the conversations, designs and efforts from over the last few years to carve out a language and a practice for imagining and animating structures of cultural spaces in contemporary cities was published in 2011. Cybermohalla Ensemble use verse to describe their project:
“To Stand Before
Change”

At times lava, at times water, at times petrol: it melts, it courses, it burns.
A shadow we chase because of our sense of connectedness.
A cunning battle with the measure of things.
A collision of forms of life.
Movement without a fixed shore.
That which does not bend according to you.
It becomes your own, but you cannot own it.
That which relentlessly takes on different masks.

“What is the sound of the war on the poor?” In 2007, the self-described militant sound collective Ultra-Red asked fifteen international artists and activists to record a one-minute audio piece in response to this question, which they compiled for the first volume of an ongoing series. The results ranged from field recordings, re-appropriated sounds, mini-symphonies, and spoken rants—both literal and abstract. For example, a reading of words taken from prisoners’ intake cards at a Philadelphia penitentiary; sounds captured when squatters took over the offices of a fruit and vegetable factory; a silent hiss.

Ultra-Red was founded by two AIDS activists, Marco Larsen and Dont Rhine, who first collaborated to counter police harassment during Los Angeles’ inaugural syringe exchange program. Realizing that video documentation would deter users from participating in the exchange, Larsen and Rhine began recording sounds as a way of monitoring law enforcement, a practice the blossomed into a series of installations and performances. Since then, Ultra-Red has expanded into an international group that explores acoustic space, social relations, and political struggle through so-called “Militant Sound Investigations,” as well as radio broadcasts, texts, and actions in public space.

“If you really want to contribute to changes in social structures, you need time.” Jeanne van Heeswijk took this ethos to heart in Valley Vibes, her effort to gather the voices of East London’s residents, who in 1998 began witnessing gentrification—or the replacement of local culture for corporate business—in their neighborhood. As part of the project, van Heeswijk, along with curator Amy Plant, built a “Vibe Detector,” a simple aluminum storage container on wheels that functions as a mobile karaoke machine, radio station, and recording studio, equipped with a professional sound kit and DAT recorder.

At the project’s launch, van Heeswijk enlisted members of the architecture and urban-planning research group CHORA to occupy sidewalks (à la street food vendors) and ask residents to use the available equipment to record their stories, music, performances, or any other signifier of local culture that countered the regeneration taking place in the neighborhood. The Vibe Detector traveled to private parties, the local hairdresser’s salon, shops, nightclubs, poetry readings, school events, municipal meetings, and festivals—wherever residents would gather to discuss issues important to them. CHORA still operates the Vibe Detector by offering the equipment for use free of charge, as well as technical assistance and marketing advice.

Van Heeswijk is the 2011 recipient of the Leonore Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change. Since 1993, she has created public art that mediates relationships among neighborhood residents by initiating different modes of communication around pressing issues. For one of her first projects, she organized a joint exhibition between Amsterdam’s Buers van Berlage art museum and the Red Cross that addressed notions of human dignity in an age of violence. In 2008, she revitalized the Afrikaander market in South Rotterdam by bringing artists, vendors, and consumers together to rebuild stalls, rethink the selection of wares for sale, and create a new economy within this struggling neighborhood.

For the past year, the irreverent Russian art collective Voina has been laying low, on the run from the police thanks to their incendiary street actions that have ranged from absurdist pranks that suggest institutional critique—throwing live cats at McDonald’s cashiers—to illegal, overtly politicized acts—flipping over parked police cars. In 2008, on the eve of Dmitri Medvedev’s election, Voina staged perhaps their most notorious performance, Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear! A three-part action carried out over the course of two days for which five couples, including a pregnant woman, had public sex in Moscow’s Timirayzev State Museum of Biology.

Two years later, on the anniversary of Che Guevara’s birthday, members of the group painted a 65-meter-tall, 27-meter-wide phallus on a drawbridge in an action outside the Federal Security Service in Saint Petersburg. Two of the group’s members, Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev, have been arrested for “hooliganism motivated by hatred or hostility toward a social group.” Though they have been released on bail, the artists face up to seven years in prison. Since its inception, membership in the collective has expanded, somewhat virally, to more than 200 participants.

Though the collective’s actions often read like high-concept pranks, they’re motivated by a serious desire to call out corruption and complacency in modern-day Russia. Speaking to the New York Times in January, 2011, about the drawbridge action, Voina member Alexey Pluster-Sarno said, “It is monumental, heroic, romantic, left-radical, an act of protest. I like it as a piece of work, not just because it is a penis.”

Support Structure was an architectural interface, created by architect Celine Condorelli and artist-curator Gavin Wade, that could be continually reinvented by its users for different purposes, such as housing objects or facilitating working environments. In each case, the infrastructure allowed the people within it to consider the meaning of the space, as well as the meaning of “support”: “While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself,” Condorelli writes about the project, “[it is also a] neglected, yet crucial mode through which we apprehend and shape the world.” Support Structure delved into a range of arenas—such as art, politics, urban renewal, and education. Through each iteration, Condorelli and Wade aimed to build a universally adaptable structure that still privileged specific needs over generic, monolithic ones.

Support Structure launched with the project “I Am A Curator,” at the Chisenhale Gallery in London, which offered storage, archival, and organizational space for artwork, and provided an interface between the public, the work, curators, and gallery staff. “I Am A Curator” also allowed Chisenhale Gallery’s visitors to be a curator for one day, using artworks housed in an architectural environment constructed inside the gallery. Their “music for shopping malls” employed existing commercial icons of the mall—muzak and shopping bags—to reflect on the components of the space that make this environment tick. “What type of cultural and experiential knowledge does a mall produce?” they asked. “music for shopping malls” treats malls of both high and low culture, and as choreographed spaces, designed and organized as interior civilizations that are cut off from the outside world, yet completely mired in the global economy and its cultural infrastructure.

Austrians are insured under the country’s universal health coverage. Yet, the homeless often go without treatment due to a highly bureaucratic system that favors those with proof of residency. When the Vienna-based collective WochenKlausur was invited to present work at the contemporary art space Vienna Succession, they organized a free mobile clinic in the Karlsplatz, a plaza near the gallery generally populated by many homeless people. The clinic, which was run out of a van and equipped to facilitate basic medical treatment, was initially designed as a prototype intended to operate for 11 weeks. This was 1993. The van still travels daily to public spaces throughout Vienna, providing medical care to over 600 people per month.

The collective—a group of eight artists—raised 70,000 Euros from commercial sponsors in order to purchase the van, medical equipment, supplies, and licensing required to operate the facility on public property. However, paying physicians’ salaries provide to be a larger obstacle, since the only viable funding source, the city government, refused to participate. But after WochenKlausur enlisted a German reporter to interview Vienna’s chancellor, the city acquiesced to the request, and continues to support two full-time positions.

Medical Care for the Homeless was the first of nearly 30 endeavors WochenKlausur has launched in the past 17 years, each designed to create immediate impact on a pressing local issue. The collective—a group of eight artists—travels to different cities upon invitation by arts institutions, reads local papers, talks to residents, and then identifies precise actions that can be carried out within a given timeframe, in order to institute sustainable change. The projects have ranged from establishing a pension for sex workers in Zurich to recycling materials from museums into objects useful to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and clothing distribution centers.

The Garden Library for Refugees and Migrant Workers was founded in 2009 as a social-artistic urban community project by ARTEAM, an interdisciplinary art collective.
The library is located in the Lewinsky Park, by the Tel Aviv central bus station. It has no walls or door. It is comprised of two bookcases, which are supported by the walls of a public shelter located in the heart of the park. The taller structure contains books for the adult readers. It is transparent and illuminated from within so that, at night, the books glow in the park. Across from it is a shorter – children’s height – cabinet.
Why a library?
Because we see the right to a book as a fundamental human right. Because a book provides both escape and shelter, a home, an identity, and a mother tongue.
Why in Lewinsky Park?
Because this is the place migrant workers congregate on weekends. It was important for us that the library come to the people, that those who maintain illegal immigrant status will come without fear, that the library would not have a closed door or a guard at the entrance who would check and ask questions.
The Books
The library contains approximately 3,500 books in Mandarin Chinese, Amharic, Thai, Tagalog, Arabic, French, Spanish, Nepalese, Bengali, Hindi, Turkish, Romanian, Sinhala, Tigrinya, and English. The children’s cabinet also holds books in Hebrew.
Sorting by Emotions
We decided from the outset not to take any element of the library as a given. We determined to replace conventional sorting systems with a unique system that would embody the spirit of the library: In addition to a color sticker marking each book’s language and listing its catalogue number, a second, 5cm-high, sticker at the bottom of each spine denotes the feelings the book aroused in the readers. The books are not catalogued according to conventions of genre or author name, but according to the feeling they arouse.
How does this work?
Within the inner binding of each book is a sticker asking (in the language of the book): “How would you describe the book?” Alongside it are seven words describing emotions the book may evoke: amusing, boring, bizarre, depressing, exciting, inspiring, sentimental.
Each emotion is color-coded. A reader returning a book is asked to choose the word which best describes his or her feelings. If the first reader, for example, thought that the book was amusing, the book will be marked by a wide purple color strip and will be placed in the Amusing section. If the second reader will agree with the first, the purple sticker will be divided in two (to indicate the number of readers) and will be returned to the Amusing section. If, however, the third reader will determine that the book is boring, the next sticker will be divided into three: two-third purple and the upper third blue, and the book will move to the Boring section. No matter how many readers thought the book was amusing, it is that last reader that decides how the book will be categorized.
The library is a small and parallel world: the books wander between the shelves as their readers have wandered/are wandering the world. They carry with them their emotional history.
Mostly, we sought to create a system that anyone could impact, in which every participant counts.
Routine
The library is open from Fridays to Sundays in the afternoon hours. It is operated by a group of about seventy volunteers, and managed by a paid manager who works a quarter-time position. Four volunteers man each shift, two of which work with the children.
Founders and supporters
ARTEAM, Interdisciplinary Art Team is a not-for-profit art organization. ARTEAM initiated and produced the library.
ARTEAM members are: Hadas Ophrat – interdisciplinary artist and art entrepreneur, Romy Achituv – artist, Marit Benisrael – interdisciplinary artist and writer, Tali Tamir – curator, Nimrod Ram – artist, Yoav Meiri – architect. Yoav Meiri designed the library in collaboration with the ARTEAMgroup members.
Lior Waterman – artist, and The Garden Library’s manager
Mesila center was founded by the Tel-Aviv municipality to assist and support foreign workers and refugees in the city. Mesila has become a full partner in the project.
A special thanks to the following institutes for their funding support:
Tel Aviv Municipality and the Tel Aviv Yafo Centennial Committee
Pais – The Israeli Lottery Organization
The Israeli Center for Libraries
A special thanks to the following for book contribution and assistance in importing books from around the globe:
Rania Ho, Beijing, China
Ami Zarchi and Ido Berger, Bangkok, Thailand
The Israeli Embassies in the Philippines, Thailand and China
The Israel Foreign Office
Book Publishers and private people who contributed books to the library
Living as Form installation –
Concept: Hadas Ofrat, Producer: Ori Carmeli

0. Reality bites

A sleepy, former dormitory city south of Tel Aviv Yafo, Bat Yam was made in one single explosion of concentrated modern blocks on pilotis.
In perfect form for a shapeless, satellite city, the center of Bat Yam is, at the same time, its border, its limit… Just south of Jaffa, an arab enclave between Bat Yam and Tel Aviv, the location of Matzevah square was also a frontier of conflict: battles for the establishment of Israel’s independence were fought there.

I. Bat Yam’s claims

Today, in spite of such intense history, and a situation that makes the Matzevah square the most important public ground transportation hub in Israel, its future seems to be played out without a real fight: Projects for banal and unresponsive towers are passed, obscure plans for the removal of ‘inconvenient’ typologies are made, and the lack of belief and ambition for the city’s future is reflected in each of the promoter’s drawings.

II. A retroactive fight

We propose to deal with Bat Yam’s historical lack of ambition with an architectural retroactive fight that will join macro and micro scale forces. A model of Matzevah area will be made, that allows for continuous experimentation and negotiations. It is a tool for urban fight, architectural battles and social life engagement and discussions. Could it be that, in the age driven by apps and software, a physical model is still the appropriate tool to engage in collective discussions?

III. A center without

Bat Yam’s Matvevah, despite being a center and the most important node of the city (and arguably one of the most interesting ones in the entire metropolitan area), doesn’t look like one. It lacks connectivity at street and pedestrian level. That is perfectly reflected in maps or aerial images of the area, in which it is almost indistinguishable from its surroundings.

IV. Proposal 1: A new star of connections

Our proposal involves a slight redesign of the street tissue around Matzevah, one that creates both new connections at street level, reinvigorating street life, commerce and public space, and a new symbol, a new center at the metropolitan scale.
If Matzevah is to become the center it deserves, one that puts in connection the diverse populations, history, and old borders around a new future, it needs to look like one.

V. Proposal 2: Occupation inside

Israel’s architecture seems to be dominated by occupation. Most discourses around architecture and urban planning are dwarfed by the political and military issues ingrained in the occupation of new territories and settlements.
At the same time, many buildings inside Israeli cities are abandoned or in need of urgent repair. Trying to make new sense of it, we adapt “Pump-Up Architecture”, first created in Spain, to Bat Yam and Israeli context at large, where post-war collective housing buildings renegotiate their relationship with open areas, allowing for a lager domestic space, and a more intense and better use of public spaces, that would make these neighborhoods sustainable in the longer term. A software tool which allows for negotiations among neighbours and with institutions, specifically designed for these cases by OSS, will be adapted for Bat Yam and Israeli conditions.

VI. Pump Up Bat Yam

The software tool and the models of Matzevah will amount to pumping up the possibilities of Bat Yam, both as the place of a growing and varied domesticity, and a symbolic new public space for connection and collaboration.