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In designing the Israeli pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, which opened on Saturday, curators Tania Coen-Uzzielli, Deborah Pinto Fdeda, Ifat Finkelman and Oren Sagiv succeeded in dealing with the most complicated loci of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a manner that is almost impartial.
Under the headline “In Statu Quo: Architecture of Negotiation,” they chose five sites in Israel and the West Bank that are sacred to Jews, Christians and Moslems alike, viewing them through the prism of the status quo. The status quo in this context is a type of ad hoc protocol that defines in detail the way a holy site is to be used over time, in a way that is not subject to the changing prevailing political situation. Each site was given a different definition/heading at the show, among them choreography, project, scene and landscape.
The curators have managed to depict the Israeli-Palestinian conflict using a perspective we haven’t seen before, in a complex and difficult way, but also with some optimism. The result is courageous, down-to-earth and aesthetic.
“We chose a topic that secular people are usually repelled by and decided to examine it from an architectural perspective,” Coen-Uzielli explained to Haaretz, before the opening of the Biennale. “We examine these locations critically but keep to the point. We don’t go into the conflict per se and don’t try to resolve it. What we can do is examine the space at each site and the spatial perspective each has, in the realization that these places have to function in spite of the conflict.”
The sites she and her colleagues selected are, in the Old City of Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Western Wall and the Mughrabi bridge leading to the Temple Mount; in Bethlehem, the Tomb of Rachel; and in Hebron, the Tomb of the Patriarchs.
In advance of planning the pavilion, the curators studied how these sites functioned over the years, long before the Oslo Accords and the Six-Day War. “During the Ottoman period [1517-1917] there was also a need to solve conflicts, since they weren't only political ones, but internal religious ones as well," the curator says. "There [were and] are arguments over whether these sites are religious or secular, and arguments between different...