Language:
Hebrew
Year of publication:
2016
Titel der Quelle:
תיאוריה וביקורת; במה ישראלית
Angaben zur Quelle:
46 (2016) 91-116
Keywords:
Art Social aspects
;
Community centers
;
Art Political aspects
;
Morashah (Jerusalem, Israel)
Abstract:
This article documents and analyzes an encounter between members of the community administration of the Jerusalem neighborhood of Musrara and members of Muslala, a group of artists active in the neighborhood’s public space. The encounter between these two groups began with cooperation, turned into a struggle, and culminated in uncompromising action to remove the artists from the neighborhood. Contrary to the cumulative knowledge in the field of Urban Studies – in which groups of artists operating in the public space are seen as agents of change and “urban renewal” – the events described in this article require us to make sense of this failed effort.In analyzing the outcome of the group’s activity, I make use of two concepts from the work of Hannah Arendt: the distinction between the political and the social, and the concept of activity in the public realm. The chief concern of public political activity is intervention in social diversity, and its implications are subject to public interpretation and may therefore be understood as violating the existing social order. Social activity, on the other hand, is concerned with normalization, and it operates within a given social language to normalize and ensure the social status quo. I argue that the group of artists operating in Musrara sought to be simultaneously “political” and “social”: through political activity, they sought to create what they termed a “dialogue” and a “point of meeting” with the Palestinians of east Musrara and to recreate local spatial diversity. At the same time, they sought to carry out this activity in a “social” and “community” manner (to use their terminology) through a coalition with long-time Jewish residents of the neighborhood. The group of artists disregarded the social threat stemming from its political activity and from the Musrara Community Administration’s vehement objection to its challenge to the existing order and its engagement with the subject of diversity in the local Palestinian context. “We thought they were going to engage in art, not politics,” community administration members argued, giving expression to the dialectic between the social and the political highlighted by Arendt. And so, every effort by the artists to be at once both social and political resulted in a sense of deception and threat among the representatives of the long-time residents.
URL:
אתר את הפרסום בקטלוג המאוחד של ספריות ישראל
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