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*HONORABLE MENTION*

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Being A Border

The French psychoanalyst André Green says that ‘You can be a citizen or you can be stateless, but it is difficult to imagine being a border’.  In every conflict we are accustomed to the division of ‘either.. or…’  and we understand the  border as an immaterial dividing line between two conflicting conditions which itself does not have any quality or essence. A question then is: What about denying taking side and imagining instead the border as a condition of overlapping of differences. The border then seizes to exist as an edge, an exteriority that hides on its other side what we want to avoid, and it becomes instead an interiority, it becomes a place.  The border then is not just a line, but a condition that enhances differences.

The idea of this project is simple:  the inversion of the dividing line in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an element that merely divides conditions, into a place that hosts a condition in its own right

The project consists of a story narrated by a fictional character called Rajiya, which is the daughter of a Palestinian father and an Israeli mother and takes place in 2050. Rajiya belongs to a hybrid nation called ‘New Zidonians’ which consists of mixed Palestinians and Israelis and occupy places that remained from the conflict of the two states: spaces In-between walls, valleys between opponent settlements, cracks on the landscape or empty lots around cities, taking advantage of natural and artificial elements. New Zidonians as a community was formed after the fictional ‘Act of Segregation’ that supposedly took place in the fictional 2022 and meant the agreement between Israelis and Palestinians to ignore each other by defining the boundaries of their jurisdiction. During that act parts of the population of both sides remained in places ignored by both states and were marked as no-mans land. These leftovers of population had to live in these leftovers of space and in time they managed to appropriate them.

The name New Zidonians comes from the Phoenician people called Zidonians who occupied the land of Phoenicia even before the coming of Israelis. Zidonians had a peculiar relationship with Israelis and their other fellow-Phoenician peoples, like Philistines, the ancestors of Palestinians. Zidonians where odd people and their mystery is lost in history

The project also consists of drawings and models that accompany the narrative by providing it with images of the conditions and the places described.

The story is itself left open. This makes the project an ongoing one and new drawings and models are added from time to time. One can say that the future of Rajiya is not yet defined as it is still left open to speculation.

Publiced at:

Ethel Baraona website, DPR Barcelona

Just Jerusalem website, MIT

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PROJECT: The New Zidonians

Honourable Mention at the Competition ‘Just Jerusalem 2050’

ORGANIZER:   Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

PLACE/TIME of project: Jerusalem and Gaza Strip, 2007

TEAM: Christiana Ioannou, Christos Papastergiou draftworks*architects

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Pages from the ‘Story of Rajiya’

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‘In between the walls’, model

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Drawings of ‘New Zidonians’ sites and structures

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Models of ’New Zidonians’ sites and structures

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‘In between the walls’, drawings

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Models

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