Jaffa Program for Art in the City
Jaffa Program for Art in the City artist residency program (Jaffa, 2023-2024) was initiated and led together with Maayan Mozes and Eran Eisenhamer, as part of School of the City at Liebling Haus. The program operated within the urban spaces of south Jaffa and was rooted in the cultural and community centers of the area.
Jaffa Program for Art in the City is a learning-in-action program aimed at creators from all fields who seek to involve other people in their artistic creation processes. The program offers them a space for study and practice within an urban environment.
The program operates from a pedagogical approach that views art as a way of life, focusing on processes rather than goals. The program offers artists time to delve into understanding the urban environment alongside opportunities to refine artistic practice and reflect on its social and environmental dimensions.
Jaffa Program for Art in the City offered a free space for collective learning that examines artists’ approaches to working in public space, built gradually through relationships and experiential learning as a method of action.
Our syllabus included workshops led by guest creators: Tal Alperstein, Dana Privas, Ahmad Harouf, Mor Kadishzon, which offered participants sensory research tools, mapping instruments, and conceptual models drawn from art, architecture, design, and cosmology.
Additionally, the program provided individual mentorship by Roni Raviv and Maayan Mozes which focused on each participant’s practice and follows the questions and purposes that arise in them. Together we accompanied artists in clarifying their motivation for personal artistic action, their involvement with the local environment and people, and supported their daily work routine.
At the end of the residency period artists shared their work with the public at an event at Beit Barkat, held as part of the center's opening week. Artists created workshops, tours and participatory events where they presented the work they developed during their residency period as part of Jaffa Program for Art in the City, which signaled was a meeting point between their personal motivations and experiences and the public realm.
Shaked Mochiach, "What Are You Dreaming Of?"
Through the work What Are You Dreaming Of Shaked Moichiach invited the audience to join a journey in Beit Barakat while listening into the depths of the dreams of girls living in Jaffa, collected during wartime. Shaked recorded the girls talking about their dreams on a weekly basis. Alongside documenting the dreams, she built choreography that brings the dream world back into the physical space.
"When I arrived in south Jaffa, I discovered a variety of populations and communities with large cultural gaps between them. I chose to work on dreams during my stay, wanting to create possible connections between different people in the dream dimension."
Aya Fakher, "Ajamieh"
For the closing event, Aya Fakher created a performative work through which she shared with the audience a collection of autobiographic texts she had written along the program, inspired by listening to the sounds of her home, accompanied by photos she had taken. The performances were held in small groups of people, and created an intimate, personal and moving encounter between Aya and her listeners.
"Throughout the program I started a process of writing about my identity, what it means to be form Jaffa, my home. I began a journey of writing and observing my personal space and the people closest to me, and realized how it all connects—what is around me and my inner world. Through other people, I can see myself."
Yael Sloma, "Jaffa Girls"
Yael Sloma presented a series of three photographs and a video which were the outcome of a meeting between her and a group of teenage girls who practice soccer at the local soccer center in south Jaffa. Yael wanted to create a new video artwork with the girls, inspired by their fascination with male soccer players, and the girls wanted Yael to create their portraits for their Instagram accounts. And so, and exchange was made possible.
"Through my video works, I try to arrange meetings with people whose work, hobbies, or life choices interest me. These works serve as a legitimate excuse for me to peek into their world, hear their story, and try to get to the core of a tiny element within it. In such encounters, there is always some kind of reciprocal relationship. I came to the program with a structured plan for a new video work. But when I met other people with their own plans for our meeting—life happened."
Danielle Rosenkranz & Mica Kupfer, "Gaza Corner Beer Sheva"
Danielle Rosenkranz and Mika Kupfer created a collaborative work - a Camera Obscura, projecting an upside-down live image of the corner of the streets outside of Beit Barakat, in which they presented a performance. The performance activated the projection of the outside world and blended with the movement of everyday life of cars, people and birds passing by.
"The work emerged from my reflections on the human-artistic-spatial system created in Beit Barakat, and its entanglement with the many other systems that shape our lives—systems that cannot be disentangled from the war. What do we become within them, and how do we dwell and act in their midst? I see both artistic and educational processes as genuine agencies—though without fixed borders—for learning, healing, empathy, beauty, and struggle."