"If you look at a city, there’s no way to see it. One person can never see a city. You can miss it, hate it, or realize that it’s taken something from you, but you can’t go somewhere and look at it and just see it empirically. It has to be informed, imagined, by many people at a time. It’s an everyday group hallucination."
Reena Spaulings, a collectively- authored novel by Bernadette Corporation
"The[ir] story [of walking in the city] begins on ground level, with footsteps. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. […] Their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements from one of these ’real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.’ ’They are not localized; it is rather they spatialize. They are no more inserted within a container…"
Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City"
The Holon project is a large- scale documentation workshop initiated by the Department of Photography at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design together with the Israeli center for digital Art. It set out to create a comprehensive, albeit lacking, portrait of the city of Holon, through the views of the Department’s 170 students and its teachers. To this end a 3-day stay in the city was organized during which the Department shifted its activity to Holon. Instead of the regular schedule, the students visited and photographed various neighborhoods, public parks, and municipal institutions, such as the city hall, the police station, schools, community centers, youth clubs, etc.
At the project’s conclusion, students submitted the results of their work in the city, in draft form, to the curatorial committee of the Holon project which consisted of three teachers from the Department: Yossi Berger, Rami Mymon, and David Adika. The committee sorted and edited the materials to curate the exhibition now on display at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon.
The city of Holon was selected for the project being a place that shares many common features with other Israeli cities, based on its level of "grayness" as it were. Holon has a typical suburban, albeit highly local, landscape. Its architecture, new as well as old, lacks all pretense. It boasts neither famous nor all-too-grand projects, and contains a concise expression of the problems as well as the charm of Israeli architecture. Holon is a normal peripheral city: a functioning city in good condition unaffected by radical problems, but it is also devoid of the aura of a big city. This median state is interesting because it accounts for the ordinary, everyday experience of the Israeli Place. The average Israeli lives in Holon.
The Holon project enabled students to experience a subjective definition of a place. Their role was to focus and observe, to look at the familiar-unfamiliar, and to experience an intense gathering of impressions. They paused and lingered on sights, spaces, people, structures, objects, and situations with alert and curious gazes, generating a wide range of photographs that elicit reflections about what we "see" and how we see "it", photographs that tell us something about Holon and about ourselves.
Yossi Berger, Head of the Photography department, Bezalel
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
