This is “Chicago”, the fake Arab town built in the middle of the Negev desert by Israel to train its military forces in urban warfare.
Though artificial, our hometown's dessicated twin is “highly realistic.” Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, whose photographs of “Chicago” collected in their eponymous book and replicated here, wrote: “To create this alternative universe, Palestinian architecture has been carefully scrutinized. Roads and alleyways have been constructed to mimic the layout of towns like Ramallah and Nablus. In one corner the ground has been covered in sand, a reference to unpaved refugee camps like Jenin. Graffiti has been applied to the walls with obscure declarations in Arabic: 'I love you Ruby' and 'Red ash, hot as blood'. Burned-out vehicles line the streets.”
Perhaps more interesting than its spatial authenticity is the fact that the history of this ghost town “directly mirrors the history of the Palestinian conflict.”
The first and second Intifada, the Gaza withdrawl, an attempted assassination of Saddam Hussein, the Battle of Falluja; almost every one of Israel's major military tactics in the Middle East over the past three decades was performed in advance here.
This is where generations of Israeli soldiers rehearse over and over again like actors in a Hollywood studio set, with props on hand or littered about, before stepping out in front of live television cameras, the whole world their captive audience, to play out their well-choreographed routines.
Meanwhile, “Chicago” is so named because its bullet-ridden fake walls apparently recall the punctured real walls of Al Capone's Chicago. While still acknowledging the dizzying complexity of Arab-Israeli relations, one wonders if a small yet meaningful step towards lasting peace could be taken if, on Israel's side, it stops vicariously engaging with the Palestinians in secret, replicant cities after first exorcising this mythological, gangster-infested Chicago from their collective memory and replace it with something real and true?
Not everyone was a mobster then, the same way not everyone offered something to our former governor for Obama's senate seat. The same way not all Palestinians are terrorists.
In any case, should the ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman and his party's racist ideology get their way in a ruling coalition with Benjamin Netanyahu, and all Israeli-Arabs get expelled from Israel, their homes and cities dismantled and resettled over, at least part of history, albeit one written by others, has been recorded for future archaeologists to reconstruct.
Un peu hors topic, mais cette fausse ville esquissée et pourtant bâtie, quelque part entre le terrain d'entraînement et l'environnement de jeu vidéo (et qui en passant commente sur la nature de la relation entre israéliens et palestiniens) dégage une atmosphère suffisamment étrange pour être postée ici, une sorte de Las Vegas noir, remplie de clichés.
Fluxxlabs work to date has been focused on sustainable energy harvesting, specifically in the form of converting small amounts of human energy into electricity. The design firm consists of two partners, Jennifer Broutin and Carmen Trudell. Both Jennifer and Carmen graduated from Columbia University�s Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design program, where they began research and collaboration.
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