Subscribe to Print Edition | Thu., December 25, 2008 Kislev 28, 5769 | | Israel Time: 11:22 (EST+7)   Back to Homepage web haaretz.com Haaretz Toolbar Diplomacy Defense Jewish World Opinion National Print Edition Car Rental Books Haaretz Magazine Business Real Estate Joy of Giving Travel Week's End Anglo File

Surroundings / With so much cleaning and planting, nothing grows By Esther Zandberg For two years or so, the architect and artist Vered Fluk would daily traverse Tel Aviv's Ibn Gvirol Street on her way to the office, passing major renovation work and being drawn "like a small child," as she put it, to the dance of the bulldozers that seemed like giant toys to her and to the excavations and construction going on underground in the bowels of the city. The combination of Fluk's childlike curiosity and her professional eye gave rise to the video installation "Curbstone," which she created together with her brother, multimedia artist Ido Fluk, and will be shown at an exhibition set to open next Tuesday at the Architect's House Gallery in Jaffa and curated by architect Shelly Cohen. The Fluks' installation focuses on the renovations taking place on Ibn Gvirol Street, but it makes reference to planning in the public space of Tel Aviv as a whole and to the ideologies behind it. It provides a sort of interim tally and a moment to think about the infrastructural drama that has swept the city for some time now. Advertisement Everything seemingly has already been said and written about the renovations along Ibn Gvirol, the kingdom of Tel Aviv's flagship street - including the conclusion that, beyond all the complaints and retorts, it is a notable achievement. All the more so thanks to the fact that it is perhaps the only architectural project in Israel resulting in a lessening of the visual overload on the street. The installation, which was filmed mainly at night, adds an almost mythic layer to the project. The name of the installation in Hebrew, "Even Safa," was borrowed from the words of landscape architect Prof. Yael Moria, whose firm, Moria Sekely Landscape Architects, spearheaded the renovation project and whose voice dominates the soundtrack for the installation. The curbstone painted blue and white and red and white and the obstacle posed by the curbstones in the middle of the street, which reign supreme on main streets in Israel, are much more than curbstones to Moria. They represent the "tools and the rules we generate and that put us in prison," and "the lack of respect for those who use the space." The removal of these stumbling blocks on Ibn Gvirol Street is not only an aesthetic accomplishment, but also "a change in the way of thinking about Ibn Gvirol not as a traffic artery, but as a street," Moria said. Moria's approach to planning in the public space is radical in its fundamental civil democracy. As opposed to the prevailing mindset which views the details of street design as a means of warning, restricting, and policing, Moria points to the option of an inviting and open space without curb protectors and barracks colors. "How much do we need the conditions and rules of the Transportation Ministry or municipal bureaucrats to decide for us that we are so irresponsible as to leap at any price into the street and commit suicide, unless they, the responsible adult, come and save us?" she admonishes. Moria herself, with her eloquent and confident diction, plays the role of the omnipotent planner in the installation. At the same time she confesses to disagreements and interventions from above, discloses doubts and shares with viewers the intimate experience of the planning. "For me, Ibn Gvirol was a kind of exercise in negotiation, in dialogue, in debate," she says. "I performed an imaginary subtraction and saw the street naked, like one big space." "No party to planning is solitary. And here everyone sees his own black and his own white and does not see the other." The "other" voice in the installation belongs to Safa Yunes, founder and director of the Jaffa non-profit organization for women's empowerment, Arus Al-Bahar L'Isha, and Nahed Skis, an activist in various non-profits in Jaffa. Both are natives of Jaffa and continue to live there. Fluk happened to meet them at a social event, and "when I made the installation, which is about Tel-Aviv Jaffa, I thought it necessary to talk to people in Jaffa; since we don't know about them." Ostensibly, they were an arbitrary choice, but Yunes and Skis hold up a mirror to the planning discourse that Moria represents and present another model, sans quotation marks. They also undermine the centrality of Ibn Gvirol Street in Tel Aviv, which is not exactly "for all of us." For Yunes, Ibn Gvirol Street is not the center of town but rather "some place outside the city," where she does not at all feel "in my own domain." From Moria's perspective, the benches along the street are "the manner in which the city hosts its people," but Yunes says she feels alienated in a place where there is not a single Arab street name. Skis - who wonders why there should not be a Sadat Square across from Rabin Square - puts the planning into perspective by declaring that, "No matter what architecture does, the people will have greater influence." In Jaffa, she says, plants grow wild from the sidewalks, and these can even be picked and eaten, but "in Tel Aviv, there is so much cleaning and arranging and planting, that nothing grows." The new exhibition is the eleventh in curator Shelly Cohen's Mekomi series (local, or my place) at the Architect's House Gallery, and which takes a critical look at planning in the public space. Vered and Ido Fluk's installation, which will be screened at the exhibition on three jumbo screens, was produced under the auspices of the Tel Aviv municipality's arts department, in cooperation with the Yehoshua Rabinovich Fund, and the Culture, Science and Sports Ministry, and with the help of a private donation. As part of the exhibition, a gallery talk is scheduled for Thursday, January 22, which will also serve as an occasion in honor of the publication of the periodical Block's sixth issue, "The East Bank." The exhibition will close January 29. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Knesset express Rightist party offers Jonathan Pollard top spot on Knesset list. Mahmoud's Gospel Ahmadinejad: If Jesus were alive, he would stand in opposition to U.S.

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