A recent text by Daniel Meridor reflects on time, economic slowdown, and the way form changes when movement decelerates.
Economic downturns are usually framed through loss and contraction. Yet alongside their damage, they also alter the experience of time. Projects pause. Construction slows. Decisions stretch. The pace at which things accumulate and disappear changes.
The last two years have been difficult for many people, and the effects have been felt in one form or another by nearly everyone. Slowing the economic machine, however, exposes processes that are usually hidden by speed. What was meant to pass quickly remains visible. Stages linger. Time asserts itself.
The text draws a parallel to painting. When a canvas is tilted steeply, paint that has been dissolved or activated on a viscous surface moves quickly, pulled by gravity into elongated trajectories. When the surface is closer to level, movement slows. Color pools. Edges soften. Shapes settle rather than cut through space.
The same can be said of human movement. Walking toward a destination tends to produce a direct line. A stroll produces deviations, loops, hesitations, and returns. Traced from above, the difference is not only psychological, but formal. Slowing alters the geometry of the path itself.
What emerges, in both cases, is not a slower version of the same outcome, but a different one altogether. Duration shapes form. Slowing time alters what can appear.
This way of thinking extends beyond painting. It applies to construction, to systems, and to how momentum organizes what becomes visible. Slowing time does not redeem crisis, but it does change the conditions under which variation becomes legible.
I love this Quote from his blog about Aesthetics (dialogue in progress): " Aesthetic attraction becomes a way of holding attention before judgment takes hold, allowing perception to linger rather than resolve immediately into meaning or evaluation."
There’s a kind of attraction I’ve always trusted. The kind that doesn’t rush me toward conclusions. When something draws me in and holds my attention before I know what to think about it, I feel more awake, more honest. That pause before judgment feels like respect. Like letting something be what it is before asking it to mean something for me.
I recognize this most clearly in relationships, but it shows up everywhere. In art, in ideas, even in the way I move through certain phases of my life. I’m drawn to the shimmer first. The feeling of possibility. The sense that something could become many things if I don’t name it too quickly.
For a long time, I mistook that lingering for depth.
What I’m learning is that staying in attraction too long can become a way of not choosing. If I never let judgment take hold, I never have to risk clarity. I don’t have to decide what something asks of me, or whether I’m willing to meet that demand. Lingering can feel generous, but it can also be a way of staying untouched.
Judgment still makes me uneasy. It feels final, and I resist anything that sounds like closing a door. But I’m starting to see that judgment doesn’t have to mean dismissal. It can mean commitment. It can mean saying, this matters enough to engage with fully, even if that engagement changes how it looks.
In relationships, I feel this most sharply. Attraction keeps things light and open, but care requires something heavier. It asks me to move from being moved by someone to being responsible to them. That shift is uncomfortable, and I see now how easy it is to call it “staying open” when it’s really staying unaccountable.
The same is true with art. I can love the mood of a piece forever, but until I let myself ask what it’s doing, why it unsettles or seduces me, it remains distant. Beautiful, but sealed.
I don’t want to lose the pause. That moment before meaning is precious. But I also don’t want to live there. Attraction should open the door, not replace the room. Judgment, carefully timed, is what lets me step inside.
Maybe the practice is learning when lingering becomes avoidance, and when judgment becomes an act of care. Not choosing too fast, but not disappearing into possibility either.
14 Likes, 2 Comments - Daniel Meridor - DESH. (@danielmeridor) on Instagram: “On the old brown beaten chesterfield In the studio, a peek at one of the new paintings. "Still…”
Part of the paining series Practicing Decay by Daniel Meridor / DESH.
'Daniel Meridor places us somewhere between hope and despair. Paused in time, we cannot be sure whether events are moving from a troubled world towards a more harmonious, serene one or the other way around. Or, whether he is depicting a world in which progress and decay, as well as technology and nature, coexist in a fragile, uncertain balance.' Lebbeus Woods
A public hearing for the ‘Paul Rudolph Riverview Adaptive Reuse’. On the stage: Diane, the moderator, Peter Brown, and myself as the project architect.
The crowd is unsettled as a group of demolition supporters is disrupting the dialogue. Diane looks at me and winks, takes the wooden model on her shoulder, and goes down the stage like a waitress in a cocktail bar, tending to tables, sharing our proposal intimately. She physically diffuses the dichotomy of us vs. them.
The Houghton Gallery Cooper Union 2011
The End Of the Year Show at the Cooper Union, the time that always made the teaching team sweat. I walk out of the gallery to review a student’s final proposal.
Diane calls my cell:
‘‘Where are you?’’
‘‘I’m smoking a cigar in a Jacuzzi’’ I answer jokingly. Diane almost faints:
‘‘It’s the last day here, we REALLY need you!’’.
Five minutes later, I enter the room and the tension dissipates. She laughs. I play the ‘Doors’ and we all dance.
Beth Israel 2017
‘‘Tell me more about Kiesler and the Dead Sea Scrolls’’ Diane asks. As I begin, Diane interrupts me, calling the nurse: ‘‘You must learn about it’’, she says, ‘‘you should join us for this one’’.
New York 2017
That was Diane: unexpected, wild, inquisitive, a good friend, a beacon of knowledge with a whimsical spark in her eye…and in the background a soundtrack of JAZZ…draw me some JAZZ
Guggenheim Museum for the City of Helsinki ART HEIM by Daniel Meridor, Johannes Pointl, Eduardo Rega
The proposal aims to maximize the integration of
the Guggenheim museum with the city of Helsinki. The project proposes an exchange in two directions: the city as the home or “heim” for the internationally renowned art of the Guggenheim, and the museum’s infrastructure as a home or “heim” for the local artists of Helsinki. The exchange performs at multiple levels: the museum enhances urbanity, enables and intensifies public events and activities, and facilitates education in the arts. Various spatial strategies such as transparency, accessibility and transference across three levels of activity will blend the Guggenheim into the city and viceversa. The
new Guggenheim becomes then a global cultural infrastructure that also provides a major covered public space for the city and spaces for local art institutions.
NORTH-SOUTH: CONNECTING
THE OLD-MARKET HALL TO THE TÄHTITORNINVUOREN PUISTO PARK
The project site exists between two major public areas of the city, one mainly dedicated to leisure
and one to social and material exchanges: the
park and the market. The Tähtitorninvuoren
Puisto Park, on the south of the site, has a very characteristic topography and vegetation, benefitting from privileged views of the city and providing an exceptional leisure area for the capital of Finland. The Old Market Hall, north of the site, is the public place of transactions, exchanges, encounters and basic cultural and economic activities of the city.
In the north-south axis, our project extends the logics of the park and those of the market to create an almost seamless hybrid condition. It creates both spaces for leisure and for transactions, vegetation and art, human encounters and privileged balconies from which to view to the city. All of these protected and enhanced below an infrastructure of art and culture of the new Guggenheim.
EAST-WEST: LINKING THE LOCAL ART SCENE TO THE NEW GUGGENHEIM
The project site lies between the waterfront on the east and the "city front" on the west. The waterfront is the point of access of ships and cargo, but it is also an area that is highly exposed to the western winds. Two blocks towards the east we find the art&design quarter of Helsinki, an area with a high concentration of local art galleries, museums, institutions and
art collectives. Our project proposes a museum
that, instead of becoming a competitor to the local art dynamics, it is a complementary enhancer of them. The Guggenheim museum, operates in two levels: one with its defining Guggenheim exhibition spaces, and one with a particular arrangement of studio, gallery and event spaces reserved for local artists. This strategy enhances the local art and expands their field of action with the support of the Guggenheim’s infrastructure.
HELSINKI’S URBAN GEOMETRIES - A HISTORY OF CITY GRIDS
It is evident that the new Guggenheim is located
in an in-between condition. It not only reacts to
the programmatic, atmospheric and cultural complexities of the north-south and east-west axes, but also to the existing urban geometries. The new Guggenheim negotiates two grids. From the urban history of Helsinki, we deduce that the system of blocks of the city was laid out as a system of grid patches. Every extension of the city was a grid- patch that adapted to the topographic conditions and was perpendicular to the coastline. This brings us
to a present urban condition of Helsinki that can be compared to an urban patchwork. Every new grid- patch is rotated in relationship the previous one.
This protocol of urban growth generates spatial opportunities in complex interstitial conditions, apparent on the limits of the patches, where one grid meets another grid. The New Guggenheim is located in one of these urban and geometric interstices and formally adapts to becoming a unique block-type for the city. A block that is elevated from the ground and that is accessible both physically and visually through shifts, facets, reflections, transparencies, etc.
PRIVILEGING EXISTING VIEWS FROM THE CITY ACROSS THE ENVELOPE OF THE NEW GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
The project, that extends predominantly horizontally, builds a zoning envelope with heights that do not interfere with views from the Tähtitorninvuoren Puisto Park, the Palace Hotel and the block directly west of the site. It privileges views towards the Helsinki Cathedral, the Uspenski Cathedral and the islands Valkosaari and Luoto.
THE MUSEUM
The museum intensifies urbanity on a part of the city that is fragmented. Providing it with public space, it ties the north to the south, the market to the park, the city to the sea, the local art community to the global art network. To achieve these connections, the project employs three main architectural tactics: the operative landform, the Local-Heim (Helsinki’s Art Hub), the Guggenheim and the techno-envelope.
OPERATIVE LANDFORM - A RENDEZVOUS FOR DISCOVERING ART
The topography and vegetation of the park is extended towards the north-east, creating a continuum between the park and the museum
area and extending all the way to the market. The ground plane of the site is liberated by elevating
the program of the museum and providing it with a large continuous public space between market and park, becoming both market and park. Shaping the ground plane, we create valleys, mountains, craters, etc, that allow for a multiplicity of public activities, from outdoor-but-roofed auditorium to outdoor- but-roofed ice-skating rink, to outdoor cinema or theater. It is from this operative landform that the public can view the art above it, getting a glimpse of the Guggenheim through planned openings and courtyards. The operative landform also reacts to the position of the truck road on the waterfront edge of the site, partly hiding it and partly offering a new visual relationship to the other side of the port.
LOCAL-HEIM: HELSINKI’S ART HUB
One level up from the open and public operative landform we find the ‘Local-Heim’, or the home for the locals. An aggregation of galleries, studios and educational spaces where local artists can develop their work and citizens can view and interact with
it. These spaces dedicated to local cultural activity are organized as interconnected individual volumes that allow for multiple groupings, sectorizations
and for various levels of flexibility for programming possibilities. key to the organization of these galleries and studios is the fact that they surround courtyards that open up towards the level below. This allows for those using the lower lever to look into what the local artists are producing and exhibiting. In section, these volumes are also shifted vertically to create openings that allow for vision into the space from beneath. Perimetrical walls of these elevated volumes perform in multiple ways, such as projection screens, reflecting light, etc, in order to activate the public ground level below.
GUGGENHEIM: A FLEXIBLE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR EXHIBITING ART
Some of the Guggenheim facilities are located on the same level as the Local-Heim, promoting interaction and fostering collaboration between the Guggenheim and the local art scene. The main performance spaces, such as the theater and the multipurpose rooms are strategically located marking the main entrances to the museum. Office-related program and administration of the Guggenheim are placed towards the south of the parcel and face the waterfront in order to privilege views and reduce distractions from the city. These spaces develop
in more than one story and connect to the main exhibition spaces above. The typology selected
for the exhibition space of the Guggenheim is an enfilade of consecutive interconnected spaces that uses the module of 3x3 and the courtyards from lower levels as structuring devices.
TECHNO-ENVELOPE: A SPACE OF SERVICE
Both Local-Heim and Guggenheim are wrapped by a structural frame of varying thicknesses. The techno- envelope is covered by transparent, translucent
and opaque but micro perforated material that curates views to the city and reveals the diversity
of the programs it envelops. This layer also holds
a variety of "technical" programs, like those that have to do with storage, utilities, humid areas, bathrooms, kitchens... etc. The techno-envelope wraps the external surfaces of both Local-Heim and Guggenheim and also serves as an environmental buffer.
TRANSVERSAL RELATIONS - ART EDUCATION THROUGH VISUAL AND PROGRAMMATIC INTERFERENCES
The main courtyards of the building allow for visual connections of the three main levels. The public sphere will have open access to viewing art from an alternative perspective. The Local-Heim organization and typology will trigger a tighter relation between the city and the local art that is being produced in Helsinki, under the vast umbrella of the Guggenheim. Citizens will have access to glimpses of the art shown in the Guggenheim before they enter the museum. The educational vocation of the building is achieved, not only through the enhancement of these visual connections, but also by producing programmatic clashes. The educational, curatorial and marketing offices are placed across local galleries and studios, mediated by a courtyard that, in turn, allows the public below to access the artistic and curatorial production. Classrooms are placed adjacent to galleries, separated by a glass wall, making the education in the arts a part of the art itself.
A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE
A museum is a twenty-four hours climate controlled environment and as such it generates its own autonomous ecosystem. Hence, any discussion about sustainability should be about reducing the energetic strains to maintain the ecosystem, presented both by global and local external climatic conditions.
WATER'S EDGE
designed next to the water's edge, the museum is to be thought of both relative to gradual global sea level rise, and to a sudden storm like the one that flooded the area in 2005. The act of physically lifting the museum and generating the public space below is not only enhancing the public accessibility to
art under the Guggenheim’s ‘roof’ but also an act to protect the art itself. The public space, with its varying topography, allows for a dry access from the city to the building when the sea level rises.
A SECOND SKIN
The multi faceted Techno Envelope is designed
as a second skin, an insulating atmospheric layer around the museum. It serves as a thermal isolation that screens the daylight and protects the museum from overheating, overcooling and glare. Its form
is designed to maximize the warming effect of the shallow angle winter sun (min 6.5 degrees) both
to the public space below and the building itself
while protecting from the summer sun (max 53.5 degrees) by reflecting its rays through the naturally lit courtyards.
COURTYARDS
The courtyards do not only collect and screen the light, but are also designed for passive cooling and heating. They direct the sun to the thermal mass of the Local-Heim spaces that accumulates the energy in order to generate a milder range of temperatures in the museum’s ecosystem as a whole.
FUTURE CHANGES AND REORGANIZATION
The last aspect of the ecosystem is the programmatic flexibility of the building. Multiple interchangeable programs are placed in the Local- Heim, and these could be adjusted for any future needs of the local community or the museum; from future expansions to new education programs or any other programs, which the future might bring.
The Ephemeral, The Transient and The Covert - Lecture by Daniel Meridor
Daniel Meridor is the founding principal of StudioDMeridor+ (established in 2010) and an Adjunct faculty member at The Cooper Union, where he has taught in the M.Arch II program, the fourth year Urban Studio and a seminar called ‘Transient Boundaries’.
His approach to architecture comes from a questioning of edges as potential spaces to be challenged. In his work, he searches for ways to distort perceived boundaries and formulate new potentials for malleable delineations, both physical and virtual. In 2005 Daniel won a Fellowship, awarding him with recognition for his research, allowing him to go independently to live in and study the mentality and patterns of nomadic living in the desert. The result was a proposal for alternative dwellings that respond to a non-static perception of attachment to the land, presented and exhibited in several forums both in Israel and the US.
With on-going research surrounding this idea of "the transient" – spanning eras, scales, visions and modes of construction, he has created a body of work that aims to challenge the accepted tenet of architecture by extracting the conditions of impermanence in which we live, in conjunction with some of the static, inflexible boundaries of the build environment.
In his practice he has also teamed up with artists and architects to work on different projects and competitions, mostly dealing with the notion of flexible boundaries, including developing a mobile technology tool for the construction field, video installations, and a series of large-scale paintings.
Daniel Meridor’s ‘Subversive Impulses in Spanish Ghost Towns’ 2015
Daniel Meridor New exhibition at the ARC, Miami, Florida, 2015, portrays a beautiful view on the potential of architects to challenge the current practices and the current economical models of construction.
The current show is a part of his on going research on subversive practices of architecture. Here, he refers specifically to the Situationist international détournement, which according to the proposal could take a physical architectural form.
The Bowery: Architect & Continuum, Panel November 20th 2015: New Museum Sky Room
Panel Speakers:
Moderator: Daniel Meridor - Cooper Union Instructor, Principal and founder of StudioDMeridor+, Artist
Panel speakers:
Nader Tehrani - The Dean of the architecture school at the Cooper Union, principal and founder of NADAAA, Boston + New York
Karen Wong - New Museum's Deputy Director and Director of External Affairs
Francois De Menil - Principal and founder of Francois de Menil Architect, P.C., Film maker
Erica Hinrichs -Chairperson of Undergraduate Architecture, Adjunct Associate Professor Pratt Institute, Principal and founder of viaARCHITECTURE, PLLC New York City
Xuan Luo - Harvard Architecture School, Cambridge.
Devon Moar - Designer at Rafael Viñoly Architects
Derek Lange - Designer at Kohn Pedersen Fox
Stephanie Yeung - Designer at Ting + Li Architects
Tyler Putnam - Designer at Robert A.M. Stern Architects
A two day symposium marks the official release of Open City: Existential Urbanity, an anthology of student work from the Architecture of the City studio, conducted by Professor Diane Lewis and a team of notable architects at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture. Focusing on work from 2001 to 2014, the book features drawings, models and project descriptions that regard any contemporary intervention into the city as an integral work of architecture, art, and sustainable infrastructure. Essays by members of the faculty and other distinguished thinkers and practitioners accompany the works. The book is edited and designed by Professor Lewis and Daniel Meridor, instructor.
OPEN CITY: EXISTENTIAL URBANITY
(Charta Milano, ISBN: 978-888158-882-4)
Edited & Designed by Diane Lewis and Daniel Meridor, Faculty
Hardcover; 368 pages,
Charta Milano
ISBN: 978-888158-882-4
Winners of ‘Beautiful Decay Competition’ Save Before Quitting
(MIAMI) – September 8th - A search for the next wave of design talent has led to five winners being selected for an architecture exhibition taking place in Opa-Locka on September 19th. The exhibit, A Beautiful Decay, is an endeavor by a newly created architecture platform called Save Before Quitting. The exhibition’s main theme is an architectural exploration into the viability of current methods of habitation. Participants were asked to interpret the topic through either real and/or speculative scenarios that tackled the issues of ever changing landscapes.
Save Before Quitting utilized a call for entries to find the next wave of up and coming designers in an effort to display their work that may otherwise have gone unnoticed. Motivation to find these talented individuals arises from the need to bring forth emerging voices in the field of art and architecture that tends to be dominated by the same few high profile designers. An ample and diverse number of participants answered the call, some of whom were still in design school while others were fairly recent graduates.
The five winning submissions are a mixed group of designers whose skills range from art, architecture and landscape architecture:
- Jacob Zindroski & Shahé Gregorian, Granada Hills, California.
- B.Cannon Ivers, Devin Dobrowolski, & Mary Catherine Miller, Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Carlos Sarmiento, New York City, New York
- Kevin Kirkwood, Oakland, California
- Daniel Meridor, New York City, New York
A Beautiful Decay is slated to open on September 19th and run until October 13th. The event is graciously sponsored by the Opa-Locka Development Corporation, with in-kind support from INT Journal and Super Architects.
Daniel Meridor In ‘Architecture within Architecture’ MoMa NY Panel
Daniel Meridor Presented his project ‘Abrading Paris’s Scar’ in a panel in MoMa last Saturday 11-21-2015.
The Panel Speakers:
Moderator -Peter Schubert, Professor at the Cooper Union and a a Partner in Ennead Architects International LLP
Barry Bergdoll - Professor of art history in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
John Marusczek - Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas, Arlington
Alan Plattus - former Associate Dean and Professor at the Yale School of Architecture, is Director and Cofounder of the Yale Urban Design Workshop.
Michael Overby - Lead designer in the New York based firm Reiser + Umemoto
Emma Fuller - Visiting Assistant Professor, Pratt institute. Lead Designer at Diane Lewis Architects
Daniel Meridor -Cooper Union Instructor, Head StudioDMeridor+, Artist
Beth Miller - Project Architect at PBDW Architects
A beautiful study of 46 drawings by Daniel Meridor looking at global topographies of radiation in land, water and air as a result of nuclear experiments in the 20th century. The drawings are observations on subject from delayering the impact of underground and overground detonations, to the global impact of utilizing nuclear energy. Its aim is to look at the layers of fiction, and facts through the lens of fear
Centrifugal Tendencies – part 2 A proposal for a new typology for a Culture Based Bedouin Settlement in Israel, the Negev Desert, Israel, 2006
In this project, Meridor confronted a dilemma: can one construct a project for another culture that has no written or physical history without imposing one’s cultural notions on it? The Bedouins are the vagabonds of the desert. For the last 1500 years, they have roamed searching for food and water, independent of states and borders. In the last century though, the development of transportation methods and surveillance technologies have allowed the government an unprecedented control of the desert. The Bedouins’ reaction to this recent attempt to impose order over their lives is what Meridor calls a “centrifugal tendency.” This is the tendency to disperse and expand. In Israel, this centrifugal tendency led the Bedouins to construct 34 unrecognized villages which do not appear on official government maps. The fact that these villages are unrecognized means that no permanent structure is allowed to be built there. However, around 45 % of Bedouins live in recognized townships constructed by the government, although these are the poorest townships in Israel, besieged with high rates of unemployment and crime. It is clear that a new vision is needed for townships that incorporate both the government’s needs to extend its jurisdiction and the Bedouins’ natural cultural customs and centrifugal tendencies. With this in mind, he designed this project...
To Be Continued
Daniel Meridor, Desert Infrastructure, Centrifugal Tendencies Part II, 2006
As a starting pointfor this project, I studied patterns of the two urban riots that took place in South Central Los Angeles in 1965 and 1992. The focus grew around the questioning of spatial configurations of the area as they propagated boundaries, reinforcing the social tensions and control by police that affected it before and after the riots. Zeroing in on moments of a riot and reading them as a community driven challenge to all existing boundaries, my project aimed to explore these agitating forces in order to provoke a new urban form.
Urban conditions before the riots, such as circulation, extension of sight, permanence of construction, police control and land parceling, were super-imposed and provoked with the spatial temporal formations of the riot. The result was distilled to a series of sixteen principles that would facilitate new delineations of boundaries as ever-changing urban sections. These could potentially enhance chance-spaces of micro-economies, non-prescribed movement and passageways, flexibility and a continuous reconfiguration of construction, reduced control and unexpected gatherings.
Centrifugal Tendencies / Daniel Meridor Impressions from the Urbanization Process of the Bedouins - 2005
It first appeared in the story of Cain and Abel. Cain’spunishment for killing his brother was to leave his land and wander the earthforever. This punishment is based on different modes of consumption –the sedentary and the nomadic; it is a story which enfolds the rudiments of a future conflict; The Story of the sedentary’s conception of its counterpart - the nomadic.
Centrifugal Tendencies is a study of the Bedouins, the nomads of the desert, and their encounter with the sedentary society through their urbanization process in Israel.
The desert’s nature is too extreme to be domesticated by humans, therefore governments perceived it as a fringe of their land. The Bedouins however, have searched out the lean resources and mastered their usage by living according to their limits and possibilities. They have drifted independent of national borders since state power could never be a threat where it lacks control. However, the development of transportation methods and weapons technology in the twentieth century altered the balance of power and allowed a gradual increase of government domination. The nomads of the desert were thus turned into subjects of the sedentary society.
The encounter of these cultures reveals two tendencies: the centripetal tendencies of the government, a tendency to amalgamate services and people for reasons of economy and control; and the centrifugal tendencies of the Bedouins, a latent attribute of nomadic tribes bursting out as tendency to decentralize and disperse.
Today there are 130,000 Bedouins in the Negev – the desert area of Israel. Around 45% are living in one city and six townships: according to official statistics they are among the poorest townships in Israel besieged with high rates of unemployment and crime. Around 55% refused to move into these townships and live in 34 unrecognized villages and eleven villages at the state of being founded, according to the state, or being recognized, according to the Bedouins.
An unrecognized village is a “non place”, a place which does not appear on official government maps since it is being perceived as an illegal occupation of state lands; in these lands no permanent structures are allowed to be built.
The photographs that form the exhibition Centrifugal Tendencies were taken between June and September 2005. They show the places in which the Bedouins live, the recognized townships and unrecognized villages. Through framing encountered situations, they expose what one person saw, A person.
Borders, edges, occupation of land and shelter are examined through these photographs. Raising a query about a way to photograph a “non place”, where no permanent marks are allowed to be recorded (on map or on land), evoked me to construct a new kind of camera lens. This lens, inspired by the desert phenomenon of a mirage, constructs a visual result of a displaced subject.
By this displacement a visual distance between the viewed and the viewer is introduced. This distance portrays a question regarding private and public realm, a relatively new notion for a nomadic-tribal society. Therefore, the foreground of these photographs is framed to be occupied by the ground, a fence or an object corresponding to the Bedouins use of assembled materials to avert invasive views.
A series of photographic studies of the horizon level examines a cultural shift in the Bedouins’ lives. Since there is no history of permanent structures built by the Bedouins their new urban villas are influenced by a mixture of sedentary cultures. Experiencing the horizon inside the Bedouins’ houses in the same manner Bedouins would inhabit their tents (laying close to the ground) evokes a question about the compatibility of walls and windows as they are manifested today to accommodate with the Bedouins centrifugal tendencies.
This exhibition is a study of alternative observations on the Bedouins. Its ultimate goal is to unveil the (hi)story of the nomadic by a series of findings about those places that were founded, yet not found by the cartographer.
Daniel Meridor, LandMark, Land Qassar al-Sir (2005)
