Zero-Level of Hoplessness
The history of the Mediterranean basin is an ongoing conflict for political hegemony, for cultural dominance and for economic imperialism. The tension began during the struggle between the north and the south throughout the Persian, Peloponnesian, Macedonian and Phoenician wars and continued in the struggle between the East and West in the wars between the Hellenists and the Romans. It was then that the Romans first created a unified cultural-political system surrounding the sea shores. The end of Western unity began with the Islamic invasion and from the eighth century until the eighteenth century, the Mediterranean was divided. Its northern Christian shores faced against its southern Muslim shores. Historical crossroads such as the Crusades, the Ottoman conquest in the east and the Spanish conquest in the west, the Napoleonic campaigns, the modern colonial settlement as well as the World Wars in the twentieth century – all these constituted stressful encounters between nations, cultures and religions. Presently, the Mediterranean basin is divided due to national, political, ethnic and religious conflicts.
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"In all honesty, if one could conduct observations from the moon, like Menippus in his times, in considering the countless oscillations of the land, you would more likely see a swarm of flies or ants fighting among themselves, struggling and setting traps, stealing from one another, playing and dancing, falling and dying, and you would not believe the troubles and tragedies caused by such a minuscule creature, which has so been decreed upon him to die in the near future".
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Today, not even a speck of rock in the southern sea can remain open, not even one remote valley, not even the moon or the planets. This is the "closing of the map" – the last piece of land without claims of ownership on the part of a nation state completely devoured. It is the sanctification of territorial gangs – since there is not even one square centimeter of the planet which is free of regimentation and taxation.
Within the Mediterranean conflictual space is also the state of israel, founded on a land made of many layers of conflicts accumulated throughout history.
A horizontal reading of the Israeli map exposes the land as such that it is constructed (even if it be by a rough division) of longitudinal phenomena. The horizontal perspective both from an aerial view and from a ground level perspective, exposes the accumulation of seemingly spearated phenomena which possess different geographic characteristics, which are different in their essence but also connected to one another by a common denominator which reflects the human state of Israel and in the common denominator of far-reaching negative influences on the landscape. Uninhibited urbanism as well as powerful politics are bringing about the systemic destruction of the landscape and are creating a daily fabric of life which is intolerable, cynical and corrupt which entrusted in the hands of empty heads and shitty minds.
The built environment is perceived not as a space framed by an ideological and historical idea with the city at the center, rather as an infinite expanse which expands beyond city centers, based on the technological and economic abilities of a productive society, while almost exclusively relating to the material element which comprises the city. A state of accumulating living units, a shallow generic development reduced to the material aspect of the house, in a spreading territorial formation. This is a total organizational mechanism. the processes which it creates are based solely on economics, capable of taking advantage of political and governmental situations for more growth and expansion. All the differences are swallowed up in the expansion and growth process, consisting of endless urban excess. The result is constant movement whose main driving power is the tension between production and consumption and it is from here that it derives its apparent stability as well as its short term economic value. This is a process which moves towards a blind replication which leads to the erasing of uniqueness and historical processes and cancels out the feeling which gives meaning to the moment we are currently living. Everything becomes flat and creating something new which is disconnected from all context except consumption becomes impossible.
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Walls, fences, barriers, dividing transportation routes, watch towers, closed gates. These were meant to allow us to hold on to the idea of normal life whose foundation is control under the guise of rule of law. This charade is maintained by the country's absolute institutions which symbolize its arbitrary power, with the Knesset at its forefront. They provide liberty which is very far removed from real freedom. This is a freedom of coalition based interests and of monetary stratagem – not of people, of the heart and the mind. They turn good deeds into a national matter which can be publicly dismissed or forced by authority.
The current relationship between israel and Palestine is that of two entities, different from each other, separated, superimposed, from above, on the tops of mountains (for observation and oppression), Juda and Samaria the land of settlers, army posts, bypass roads, and from below, a land of villages and dirt roads. The settlements are justified by arguing for national security and a godly right while suspending the palestinian use of space and wasting large amounts of public resources as this requires huge investments due to the need for new infrastructure including, roads, water, electricity, education and housing.
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The political conflict creates a geographic disaster. A disaster in this sense is a widespread event, with occurrences of suffering and loss, beside the complete or partial collapse of the entities of time and space. Targeted deconstruction of time and space and breaking routine, are deeds with the goal of creating a loss in terms of orientation in terms of space and time and to interrupt and weaken one's personality. The government in this instance, does not wish to restore order, rather it is the primary source and creator of chaos.
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In the action of planning itself, the architect makes decisions which create a reality of lowering the quality of life as well as the built surroundings, while carrying out material duplication of generic residential units and a political culture of disruption, repression, aggression and racism. In light of the current state of things, you could say that many architects today are either immoral people or they lack substance. Our country, which aspired to be a brotherhood, has become an ant farm of lonely people. In the absence of happiness, the existence of ongoing suffering is becoming a decree of fate.
Today's reality is a crime of logic. Instead of dealing with their nothingness, woes, labor and tragedy of life, man is left alone and bored, his life wears his strength. If man wishes to feel alive, he must become addicted to the terrible excitement of short and eliminatory actions. a state of mind that is devoid of meaning where political and economic powers can easily penetrate. We are sleeping at ease whilst we know that society is drawing its mediocre pleasures from the work of millions of dead souls. A productive society which is producing but not creating. It aspires to not only destroy personalities, but also the universal possibilities of personality itself: the possibilities for thinking, solidarity, being drawn to absolute love.
Negating nature and beauty for the sake of history is the daily disaster which we live. Accepting the current situation for what it is, stems from the frustration at our meager control over it and leaves us as odd citizens of the world – exiles in our own homeland.
Were we sentenced to a world to not stand, not even for one moment on a piece of land which is ruled only by freedom? The concern of the project is with the desire for decontextualization and the belief in the abilities of man even when he is supposedly entangled and trapped in the establishment's large web of power. Desired provinces, beyond the border, the land of nature, which offers wide open spaces.
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The positioning of the project in the quarry stemmed from my search for an space with the potential to blossom as an autonomous area, relatively open, potentially as a result of neglect on the state’s part. It is a lacking territory in a place of conflict for units of territory, land which is not land in a reality where the landscape is gradually disappearing, a place which allows international access from opposite directions, a delineated space without the need for walls, placing oneself in the depth of the land and not on the tops of mountains, the possibility to add nature instead of subtracting her.
In a similar manner that a recess refutes the continuity of existing time, so too the logic of the project hinders the continuity of the existing built surroundings. This is a "utopian" place only in the sense that it simulates the intensification of daily life, for the possibility of leisure and creativity, of disconnecting from context. But it cannot be utopian in the real sense of the word, nowhere, or a place-which-is-not-a-place. It is real, exists where it is, resides at a crossroads of many forces, a sort of pagan power point found at the intersection of mysterious lines.
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The 'Temenos' which means a delineated place, sanctified, is a derivative of the word 'Tempo' – intersection. The Temenos as such is an intersection, a separate space from the existing fabric of reality. It establishes a fundamental distinction between what is outside and what is inside. This is a space which can be a space of hidden visibility. A disappearance tactic. It is about ejection, the revealing something hidden and in absolute lack of continuity. This is an event, a recess, which becomes permanent and is translated into specific architecture. The translation is a structural reaction to a spatial crisis. It dismantles traditional structural hierarchies, causes borders to disintegrate, an alternative territory instead of a head-on collision with the final state.
It is the empowerment, the redundancies, a life which exists in living and not just surviving. It is not overly concerned with what "was" or "will be" rather interested in results, with successful attack on the spatial consensus, in Breaking through to a life which is more intensive and plentiful. This is part of the attempt for essentialist reconstruction of a section of the Israeli space, which undermines the contemporary monolithic Israeli spatial condition.
