Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Staring into the abyss to envision a conservation plan.......
The goal: mediating between the Israeli national narrative and the Lifta conservation plan.
The conservation plan for Lifta will be unique. The local planning authority and the legal land owner will be confronted to closely examine the offer to negotiate the space for the design of the conservation plan. This is with attention to the period just prior to the events of 1948; the uprooting of the village. Therefore, any concept of place has to envisage that the story of the village Lifta is being told within a national narrative that openly accepts truths that occurred during the Palestinian Catastrophe Nakba and the Independence of Israel. FAST's campaign journey so far has concluded an appraisal of Lifta to be synonymous of a tragedy and a stark symbol of Retribution. (For further reading on Lifta’s appraisal click on the December blog: 'Crime & Retribution' or scroll down below.) So how do you sustain the trust of the vanquisher so that they may anticipate their past actions without the predicament of compromising their truths to a vulnerable effect? And how do you appropriate a place of reconciliation in hope to consequently redeem this symbol of retribution?
Lifta becomes the untold story of a nation. It epitomizes a common history shared between two ethnic groups. Each group subjective by experience and having their own individual identity of higher values articulated through dualities of orientation, outlook and beliefs. Lifta confronts conquest and despair; the place ties together two opposing value systems. Both the existential identities of the conqueror and the conquered also have the further capacity to engage and recipricate their mythologies into a combination of curative acts. How do the conjunctions of these truths fit together? How is the role of the conservation plan and architecture involved to allow a contestation of history through sustainability and creativity? What beneficial reality constructions can these opposing value systems generate together? And finally, what new environment will result out of this re-imagined narrative?
These are preliminary questions etching the surface of an investigation into creating Lifta's conservation plan. To commence shortly.....
The goal: mediating between the Israeli national narrative and the Lifta conservation plan.
The conservation plan for Lifta will be unique. The local planning authority and the legal land owner will be confronted to closely examine the offer to negotiate the space for the design of the conservation plan. This is with attention to the period just prior to the events of 1948; the uprooting of the village. Therefore, any concept of place has to envisage that the story of the village Lifta is being told within a national narrative that openly accepts truths that occurred during the Palestinian Catastrophe Nakba and the Independence of Israel. FAST's campaign journey so far has concluded an appraisal of Lifta to be synonymous of a tragedy and a stark symbol of Retribution. (For further reading on Lifta’s appraisal click on the December blog: 'Crime & Retribution' or scroll down below.) So how do you sustain the trust of the vanquisher so that they may anticipate their past actions without the predicament of compromising their truths to a vulnerable effect? And how do you appropriate a place of reconciliation in hope to consequently redeem this symbol of retribution?
Lifta becomes the untold story of a nation. It epitomizes a common history shared between two ethnic groups. Each group subjective by experience and having their own individual identity of higher values articulated through dualities of orientation, outlook and beliefs. Lifta confronts conquest and despair; the place ties together two opposing value systems. Both the existential identities of the conqueror and the conquered also have the further capacity to engage and recipricate their mythologies into a combination of curative acts. How do the conjunctions of these truths fit together? How is the role of the conservation plan and architecture involved to allow a contestation of history through sustainability and creativity? What beneficial reality constructions can these opposing value systems generate together? And finally, what new environment will result out of this re-imagined narrative?
These are preliminary questions etching the surface of an investigation into creating Lifta's conservation plan. To commence shortly.....
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