A while ago, I blogged about a meta-tourism project created by my friend, media artist Mushon Zer Aviv, called You Are Not Here (YANH), a play on the directional “You are HERE” found on maps everywhere.
YANH is an urban tourism mash-up. It takes place in the streets of one city and invites participants to become meta-tourists of another city. The way it works is : You download a map, take your phone with you and go tour Gaza through the streets of Tel Aviv or Baghdad through the streets of New York. It started as a tour of Baghdad through the streets of NY, a project dreamed up by Mushon and some of his colleagues while a graduate student at NYU’s ITP program.
I collaborated with Mushon on the Gaza iteration of the project, writing and recording the locations in Gaza City. The project was presented in many an exhibit, including Rotterdam’s Digital Electronic Art Festival and Istanbul’s Akbank Gallery. During the past few months, we updated the sites and recordings to reflect the current reality, and re-launched the tour for a theater exhibition at the (first) ArtTLV biennial in Tel Aviv.
Reuters, Haaretz, and the Abu Dhabi National and the Dutch NOSJOURNAAL (use google translate for this piece) among others covered the re-launch (links below).
Re-recording the locations was a very strange, very emotional experience, something that is mirrored in the tour itself. Its been a while since I’ve been able to return to Gaza, and so much has changed that I feel like a stranger-one that is nevertheless intimately familiar-with this city, this place I call home. So relying on my own personal knowledge and experience, and filling in the details with the help of my parents, Wikimapia, and some research of our own, we pieced together the most accurate descriptions we could. I tried to make the recordings as intimate and as colorful as possible-I really wanted to disorient the listener/walker, challenge their commonly held perceptions and their relationship to Gaza, all while reflecting the current reality.
As we made clear to all media outlets we spoke with: this is NOT a normalization initiative (if you didn’t catch it, notice the deliberately broken beach umbrella in the project’s logo above, created by our colleague Dan Phiffer). As one of the journalists covering the project put it, the tour serves to “create an association in the mind of the listener-to momentarily disorient the tourist and then reorient them with a new perspective—one that includes Gaza as part of their consciousness.”
You can read more about our thoughts in the articles above. I’ve also provided a sample recordings below. If they are not working, you can also access that at the YANH website itself. Enjoy!