The Nightlight Festival takes place every year in Tel Aviv in the Neve Sha'anan district. Artists from all over the world come to exhibit their light installations, performances or projections there. In December, the Nightlight Festival took place for the fifth time. This year, as exchange students from the HIT Holon Institute of Technology, we were invited to take part in the festival.
The project took place in collaboration with chiara schmidt , nico brand and charlotte savine.
NEVE SHA’ANAN FESTIVAL
The atmosphere of the neighbourhood is difficult to explain. On the one hand, it is colourful, multicultural, the air is full of different smells, but on the other hand, the neighbourhood is characterised by drugs, prostitution and crime. The houses are run down, there is an unpleasant smell in many of the alleys, rubbish and rats are in the streets.
The people in charge of the city don't care about the people, they are more or less on their own. Many of them cannot find work and want to leave the neighbourhood or Israel, but hey are stuck in the neighbourhood. The place where we were allowed to work was a "Modern Shisha Lounge", which used to be a car wash. It looked uninviting from the outside, the front area outside was used as a parking lot.
The "Shiha Lounge" itself was quite dark in atmosphere, the walls and ceiling were covered with cloths and blankets, plastic tables and chairs were lined up, there was a projector for football and a counter for coffee and smoothies. African mens sat here and played cards.
The idea for the Nightlight Festival was to create a space that is open to the public, this should be more attractive, clean and lively and a proposal for a meeting place in Neve Shanan. For this we wanted to paint the walls in African colours and create patterns out of tape for walls and plastic chairs. Seats were to be built for the corners. The workshop studio MOLET in Tel Aviv made its workshop available to us, where we built seats from collected old wooden pallets.