The students of Design for the Living World and their guests attended the gathering The Neighbourhood as Global Arena at the invitation of the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon, where they participated in a workshop with students from the Civic Architecture Unit and Public Lab of the Department of Architecture at the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Jerusalem. The event marked the culmination of the two-year project Glocal Neighbours, a collaboration between the Jessy Cohen neighbourhood in Holon and the Nordbahnhof neighbourhood in Stuttgart. In the four-day gathering, the students joined local residents, artists, architects, social workers, activists and community organizers to examine the questions: Which global, economic and political processes make the neighbourhood? And what kind of institutions should we have in the neighbourhood to respond to these processes?
Title: The Neighbourhood as Global Arena – A Gathering
Dates: December 8-19, 2015.
Location: The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Jessy Cohen neighborhood of Holon, Israel.
Students: Finn Brüggemann, Francisca Concha, Janis Fisch, Tino Holzmann, Lea Kirstein, Kathrin Sohlbach, William Schwartz, Julia Wycisk and guests of the class Moritz Brettschneider (cultural producer, Hamburg) and Max Neu (Beuth Hochschule Berlin).
Supported by: The German-israeli Future Forum, Goethe Institut Tel Aviv, Roza Luxemburg Foundation, IFA and the Israeli Lottery Fund.
Finn Brüggemann: The Archipel Project
in Neighborhood as a Global Arena Reader: Glocal Neighbors, Vol.1
Marjetica Potrč: Self-Organization Where the State Has Withdrawn
in Neighborhood as a Global Arena Reader: Infrastructures and Methodologies, Vol.3
in the publication Neighborhood as a Global Arena Reader,
published by The Israeli Center for Digital Art, Israel, 2015
Neighborhood as a Global Arena, The Israeli Center for Digital Art, 2015
Being together: Presentations, conversations and encounters
The Digital Art Lab (DAL) is an art institution dedicated to working in the political context. Located in the impoverished and ethnically diverse Jessy Cohen neighbourhood in Holon, near Tel Aviv, DAL is in the process of transforming themselves from an exhibition-based space to a project space that encourages the close involvement of local residents; in this way DAL is fundamentally reinventing their role as an art institution and their relationship to the public. While DAL focuses on the local, they also exchange knowledge and practices with partners in their global network.
Working together: The hammock and the tree, the bench and the column, the fireplace and the soil
Over several days of work together, students from Design for the Living World, Civic Architecture students from the Bezalel Academy, and young people from Holon constructed three relational objects: a bench, a hammock, and a fireplace. But if these objects are going to last, the youth of Jessy Cohen must claim them as their own. Will they assume ownership or will the objects be vandalized after a few days? DAL has informed us that since we left the young people have maintained an ongoing ‘dialogue’ with the objects. For instance, the bench was moved to a new site but no vandalism occurred. Thus the constructions are indeed proving to be relational objects, building relationships both among neighbours and between the neighbourhood and the institution in transition.
LINKS AND REFERENCES
Design for the Living World, HFBK 
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