Community based art workshop at Zumu Festival

A week ago we finished placing two sculptures in a public garden down in Jaffa Daled neighborhood – sculptures that were created in a community-based art workshop with the neighborhood’s children. The wonderful opportunity came to us under the auspices of Zumu – a mobile, community-based museum that travels throughout Israel and presents changing exhibitions that are created and curated in collaboration with the local community. Zumu’s seventh station “The Threshold – Jaffa Daled” operated for the first time in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa area, but not by chance in the southern end of Jaffa which borders Bat Yam. The action was defined in the catalog of the event as based on a community that moves on the threshold between the temporary and the permanent, the local and the external, and between the nostalgic and sentimental and the progressive and renewed.

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Photo by Yair Meyuhas

When we received the call for proposal we immediately fell in love with the idea behind the event along with a delightful wave of nostalgia. Our studio was born in Jaffa and the eclectic, improvised, cultural and social “in-between” essence of the city permeated us during the seven years we lived in the city and evolved into the choices of raw materials, the designers and the local professionals who accompanied us in our work and blossomed into a multitude of products of the studio in one of the most fertile, frantic and creative periods that were us.

The work and creation in the studio in the city of Shoham, where we currently operate, is characterized by much clearer limits of working hours, well-defined products that are specially adapted to the space/client, a budget framework, and a lot of peace & quiet around. Our life here is much more orderly, clean, and logical, but when looking for inspiration the first three places we go to are children, nature and to our old but always fresh city of Jaffa.

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Wild Things, first generation. Farm Gallery. Photo by Anton Sverdlov

We decided to submit an offer for a pair of miraculous creatures – seating and playing accessories, and sculptural games. Hybrid creatures that combine a piece of furniture, a musical instrument, a game and a sculpture, a development of “Max and Mama” from our solo exhibition “Very Mature” in The Farm Gallery Holon that closed a few months ago. Unlike them, which stood in the gallery and were covered with combinations of synthetic and natural materials, the new sculptures were intended to be placed outside for several months, therefore the material chosen for the construction was a perforated galvanized tin plate, the type that can be seen on street benches and metal garbage cans. The holes will be used for threading and tying recycled t-shirt threads in random colors (and in huge amounts). In order to facilitate the process, which we intended for the activity of an art workshop in the community with the children of the neighborhood, we decided not to connect the boards that will build the sculptures until the end of the craft of interweaving the threads, so they can also enjoy the wonder of a three-dimensional body created from surfaces. To prevent the risk of injury from the sharp edges, we trimmed them with a rubber profile that also contributed to the finished look of the parts. The faces – musical instruments of the phantom drum type (Hank Drums) which were created from the recycling of air conditioner gas logs that were sawn and welded to the perforated tin plates, because the tones were made by delicately cutting the tin tabs with a saw. We made the knobs from skewers and used corks. To complete the look, we added a chest and bottoms made of a shiny stainless steel ladle from which we removed the handles (which are currently hanging in our studio and waiting for us to find a reuse for them..)

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On the evening of the opening of the festival, we arrived at the garden immersed in the smoke of barbecues, laid out the pieces, and began the work of tying them. Individual knots and threads gathered together and became dense fur that went and covered the parts of the wild creatures. Our craft and community-based workshop have begun.

The first to recognize what was happening were the children of the neighborhood who attend the nearby Itamar Ben Avi school who came and spread their patronage over us. Minutes later, children from the nearby barbecue also joined the craft along with passers-by from the north of the city who came to the festival. At this point we no longer had to explain – The children collaborate and showed each other the working methods they had developed, threaded threads, tied, cut, braided, changed places and roles. It was wonderful to see the small community formed between children from different places, guests and locals around the craft of creation.

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The Stone Garden gang. Photo by Dafna Shir

We finished the first evening with one creature covered in fur and assembled and the second halfway accompanied by the children of the garden who promised to come tomorrow as well, and indeed the next day we arrived to finish connecting the parts and place the sculptures with the help of the festival’s treasures, to the children’s cheers. The gatekeepers of Gan Even will be standing in place for the next four months, so come visit Jaffa Daled, “Gan Even” in Waze, hug the miraculous creatures created by the local community and the visitors of Zumu festival, play them and tell us how they survive the winter.

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Ron Huldai also came to visit. Photo by Orna Gattegno

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After assembly, before placement. Photo by Yair Meyuhas

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Zumu’s Hamiftan Jaffa curators:

Milana Gitzin-Adiram: Executive director & chief curator

Shachar Ben Nun: Curator

Hadasa Cohen: Curator

Avshalom Suliman: Curator