In recent years Relli De Vries has surveyed the dispersion of domed parking barriers – a concrete-and-granolith architectural detail spread across various cities and towns in Israel. De Vries documents their construction and maps their location as a part of her interest in happenings and behavior in liminal-urban areas and in the material language that characterizes them. She focuses on the urban and geo-political space of the broad borderline between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Her choice to map that sensitive area while deploying a seemingly negligible architecturally designed detail sheds light on the political essence of the mapping itself, and on the blind spots it creates.

A map is a visual representation that draws a certain space in abstract form. In the distant past, maps were designed by artists, and in modern times they have been appropriated by science, namely cartography. However, largely because of and despite their scientific and objective aura maps are created or commissioned by power holders, thus reflecting the latter’s broad or narrow interests. The questions who is allowed to map, and what is awarded a map, and what has been left unseen, are at the heart of De Vries’s process. Her work has visual and spatial implications, and is relevant to greater issues of orientation and self-location, both physically and symbolically. Thus De Vries joins a local and international trend that can be defined as guerilla, or autonomous mapping, whereby individuals and organizations take up mapping on their own initiative in order to advance a perspective on a certain issue, usually a burning political one associated with urban space. In Israel, for example, many of the mapping activities are associated with the Israel-Palestine conflict. Peace Now is constantly mapping the settlements, and activist artist Hagit Keysar has worked on aerial photographs that document ‘unrecognized’ villages. The mapping act De Vries proposes here examines the way political issues that shape life in Israel are expressed in urban space. The map and the accompanying event in the Allenby Passage are one part of a long term research.

The dome is a physically, culturally and politically charged form. It is a bent-plane and hemispheric body that is considered a pure element form. The dome is constituted by pressing and stretching forces. The way they disperse across the dome’s outer shell provides its robust structure with  natural constructive solidity, as if the form itself holds the foundations supporting it. Moreover, as its title discloses, the dome denotes the ‘skull cap’ of the male religious Jew, making his religious affiliation identifiable from a distance. It is, however, also associated with the mosque and burial places of Moslem and Jewish holy men, enabling their spatial distinction. From another, cosmic, direction, the dome is identified with celestial bodies, and provokes the notion of the cultural twosome sun and moon, of the moon’s reflection, and the crescent that adorns a mosque dome. One of the most culturally and socially charged spots in Tel-Aviv is perhaps the Hassan Bek mosque, on the Jaffa-Tel Aviv border. In the past its dome was painted a beautiful light blue, but since it was vandalized following the Dolphinarium discotheque suicide bombing in 2001, it has been whitened and never returned to its former glory.

The barrier domes attracted De Vries’s attention both as a landscape architect and an artist. In the map De Vries demonstrates the physical make-up of the barrier domes based on materials from the Mediterranean region, by and large conglomerating the movement of materials in the Middle East. Her investigation of this material geography uncovers another layer in the dome’s political essence. As such she thinks of the ‘dome’ as a topographical form planted artificially around the city. At the same time, however, she perceives the dome as a power-driven entity that seeks to regulate and regiment urban space. In her research of that apparently esoteric subject De Vries discovered the civilian and urban dynamics generated around the domes. For example, she found out that residents protest the presence of the impeding domes that restrict parking space for motorcycles and other vehicles. The residents move them, despite their heavy weight (some 120 kg.), and they are left pushed aside for a long time. Thus a new and unexpected random distribution pattern is constructed, tangible and seen. The continuous alterations in their positions and locations draw a dynamic and changing map of the city, of its neglected and other, carefully groomed parts, and of city residents who take space into their own hands and act upon it, of objects that were immersed in urban space by the municipal body, and now grow wildly whit-in it.

De Vries seeks to illuminate the domes physically and conceptually, and to map their movements, as a car that moves in the dark, passing by the domes and lighting them up, casting a shadow over them and thus evoking the dark side of the moon.

Hila Cohen-Schneiderman, October 2013.