Friday, March 25, 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which claimed the lives of 146 garment workers trapped at their machines. Most of the people who died, either consumed by flames, or jumping out of the windows on the ninth floor, were young women, recent immigrants. This is the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City.

Terrible Karma is project Merle Patchett and I put together. The title - Terrible Karma – refers to both the title of a protest song sung by Cambodian female garment workers at a union rally in Phnom Penh (July 2010) and to the idea that events of the garment industry past continue to haunt the present, that they are always coming back.

Merle  and I will be out this Friday morning and afternoon (10-2) in downtown Manhattan, at Cooper Square, and near the location of the fire, at Washington Place and Greene Street. Follow the path on the map, and look out for our UHAUL truck, containing the audio-visual installation above. If you’re in town, drop by and spend some time in the back of the truck, feeling the reverberations of the fire, 100 years later.

It is July 2006, and Israel is at war again with Lebanon. Terrible waves of shelling sweep over densely populated south Beirut and the Israeli army enters southern Lebanon. Small mines, shaped and colored like toys rain from Israeli planes into farmer’s fields, making a deadly harvest. Each day, missiles assail the northern Israeli towns closest to the border. There is little protection for Arab Israelis. Their communities are hit hard. An overwhelming silence about Lebanese casualties engulfs the country—a wall of support-our-troops-bomb-them-into-the-next-century rises up into the air. On Israeli television a few heartfelt cries to please stop the bombing come from Arab Israelis standing in the ruins of their neighborhood, places forgotten long before the war.

I am in Tel Aviv, “Israel’s urban bubble,” where there are no demonstrations. (This is not to say that there are never any protest for peace in Israel. Here’s one from the other day. They’re just hard to find during wartime). At Hagada Smalit, the Left Bank, a cultural center, art gallery and the headquarters of Hadash, Israel’s communist party, a few painted placards lean against the wall in the corner behind the stairwell. Another kind of commentary is emerging on the city’s surfaces—quietly covering the walls and boulevards of particular neighborhoods, and entering into the everyday experiences of walking, riding and driving in the city. Commentary like this:

Am Israel hai: The people of Israel live

Am Israel hai?: The people of Israel live?

Am Israel hai al kharbo: The people of Israel live by the sword

Am Israel hai al heshbon mi?: The people of Israel live, [but] at whose expense?

Tel Aviv is indeed a surprising, confounding place to be during war-time. Despite the city’s absorption of refugees from the besieged north into its homes and hotels, and the signs at restaurants, bars and other shops offering free food and merchandise to refugees, everyday life in the “city that never sleeps” does not appear altered in any significant way. A stroll along the lively boulevards of the city reveal musicians playing at street cafes or sun-darkened French, American and Israeli children building in the sandy surf of the Mediterranean. At dusk lounging on one of the city’s many rooftops, with the darkened water shimmering just beyond the palm-tree line boulevards, and throughout the night, the sounds of construction on the any one of the city’s many new high rises are all that disturbs the peace. There is no great increase in the ubiquitous armed military or police personnel; there is no announcement by authorities for citizens to ready themselves for attack. In the apartment building in which I stay, residents remove their bicycles from the basement bomb shelter (which doubles as a music studio from time to time), and someone brings in two water containers. Within a few days, the bicycles are back and the water jugs removed. Tel Aviv, geographically and psychically, remains in experience a few kilometers outside of the war zone. For this reason, the events and inscriptions that refer to the war, directly or otherwise, are most striking and most difficult to easily categorize or explain.

Tel Aviv July, 2009

Neve Tzedek and Florentine are unlike many other parts of the city, in that the walls of these neighborhoods are covered in all kinds of “writing.” Ranging from graffiti to street art, posters and flyers, this writing screams and whispers for the attention of passers-by.

Reading walls while walking both requires and trains a sense of the city that is difficult to get by perusing the statistics of the planning department, or attending community meetings. The discourse on the walls is of a different character—a kind of ubiquitous white noise, noticeable in an otherwise clean, “white” city. Let’s take up the task of reading while walking this city. Because the writings on the walls, and the experience of reading them, provide a complex commentary upon the ongoing physical, economic and political transformations faced by Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

these flyers began appearing this fall, on the makeshift walls of construction sites around my neighborhood. Get a close-up look:

DEMONCRACY: Government of the vast majority, by a tiny minority, through war, usurpation and propaganda

WALLS

I hang a picture on the wall, then I forget that there is a wall,
I don’t remember what stands behind this wall, I don’t remember that there is a wall.
It is nothing but a rest for the picture. But I forget the picture as well,
I don’t look at it any more, I no longer know (how) to look at it.

– Georges Perec (translated by Itai Kriss)

“That’s what street art is for, to remind us we are surrounded”

–SHAMELESS