In Jerusalem, the model of the partitioned city divided into enclaves is assuming a form that can be taken as the limit case of a worldwide urban process. Discrimination is above all a matter of spatial form and spatial practices. A just, peaceful and sustainable Jerusalem can become a “city of thresholds” rather than a city of enclaves. Urban thresholds are not urban parentheses. Urban thresholds are neither buffer zones, nor no-man’s land located between separated urban areas. Urban thresholds are more like bridges to otherness. They constitute the spatial equivalent of differentiation through comparison rather than through separation. Urban thresholds can be those social spatial artifacts with which to create the city as a collective work of art. Thresholds, epitomized in the experience of crossing, can express as well as symbolize the meaning of human interaction, exchange and communication.
We have chosen to participate in the Just Jerusalem Competition, by expressing our ideas in the form of a video-dance film. As a multidisciplinary team, we wanted to investigate the role space plays in the potential transformation of collective imaginary. Taking as a starting point the experience of being confined inside a barrel, we develop a choreography of struggle and resignation. The dancing body attempts to express the contradictory experience of the enclave (shelter as well as prison). It is by reaching beyond this experience, that the dancing body discovers how to “unfold” the barrel in order to create a passage, a passage to otherness. The city of thresholds can emerge from within a city of enclaves, provided that people attempt to re-invent space by their inhabiting and expressive practices in search of mutual respect and solidarity.
