The City's Craftswoman

The City's Craftswoman follows Jerusalem municipality's model maker in her daily routine. Located in the basement of Jerusalem's city hall, Jerusalem's city model serves as a tool for urban planning and development. The model maker's task is to maintain the model's integrity and add new miniature buildings, which were authorized by Jerusalem's planning division but have not yet been built in real life. Thus, Jerusalem's city model reflects the future image of the city rather than its present state.

The City's Craftswoman points to the layered ideological mechanisms of memorialization, colonization, and nation-building – locating those within female gender roles of care and maintenance. The piece foregrounds the ways grief and trauma are utilized by the state as tools for occupation, expansion, and seizure of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. Through focusing on the aesthetic and bureaucratic actions of the model maker the work observes the materialization of ideology as it begins to cross the invisible line from imagination to implementation.