City Craftswoman / Video / 2015
On the basement level of the Jerusalem Municipality complex in Safra Square stands a model of the city. A model of Jerusalem delineating the western entrance all across to the roads surrounding Mount Scopus. It is comprised of thousands of pieces, sized at a 1:500 scale. This little Jerusalem stands in a room without windows, bathed in fluorescent light, dim and tranquil.
The model is used by the city planning department and is constantly updated by its staff. Future projects are effectuated in the model before they arise in the city’s physical space; before making your way to Jerusalem above you have to get through the Jerusalem below, down in the basement.
In the “City Craftswoman” video, the camera of Tali Keren tracks the work of the model updater during her daily routine. She is the one that revises the model, changing it according to plans sent to her by the engineering department. We follow her in the small office as she creates a small structure using laser cutting. She assembles the facades of the building in measured motions, well-practiced in her task. She also peels and slices an apple in this manner. This is how she eats and moves and listens to the radio; on the classical music radio channel they are broadcasting the 6th movement of Brahms’s Requiem (“Blessed are the dead…that they rest from their labors, and their works shall follow them”).
When she is done, she takes the completed building model to the model room, where pieces are all set on wheels. Entire sections of the city may be assembled and disassembled, and that is her assignment: pulling out unit after unit, creating sinkholes in the space, paving a path to the east of the city. Surrounded by the tiny capital and towering above it, a female colossus—a protective and munificent goddess with the power to decimate this lilliputian city sprawled around and beneath her. She pinpoints a structure destined for destruction, planting a new one in its place. Any perspective on the future is shaped by the rewriting of the past by the present.