The Urban Field Manifesto

In the Project Room’s 6th exhibition, Studio MA calls on us to reimagine the public space and the synergy between people, nature and the urban environment. We fix our gaze on different types of local weeds, weeds which are both resilient and unwanted. The Manifesto at the heart of the exhibition was drafted with a sense of urgency – ever-increasing city density and diminishing public space are the outcome of global and local tendencies toward overdevelopment and privatization, while the global ecological crisis has proven humans to be a driving “natural force” affecting the environment.

Studio MA's sensory installation of performative resistance reaches out to anyone who shares the public space. It seeks to stimulate the imagination with new, flexible possibilities in space, ones which leave room for variability and change. It is an attempt to heighten awareness and engender collaborative responsibility, and to create a platform for a conceptual and a practical discourse for an inclusive planning framework. Such a framework – aimed at placing primary focus on nature and the fundamental emotional needs of people – is the urban field.

What is the White City? #6
The Urban Field Manifesto
Studio MA: Prof. Yael Moria, Adi Levy Trau (architect), Amir Lotan (landscape architect), Alaa Shulhut (landscape architect), Olga Stadniuk (designer), and the studio team
Guest artist: Nirit Binyamini Ben Meir
Curator: Sabrina Cegla
Opening: Thurs. Dec. 1, 2022, 8:00 PM
Exhibition dates: Dec. 1, 2022 through July 8, 2023
With thanks to: Shaham Ariha, Ackerstein, Hochberg Nursery

Studio MA is a collaborative platform for multi-disciplinary research: spatial activism, urban events, exhibitions, sustainability and inclusive design. The studio operates as an integral part of Moria Architects, a landscape architecture firm with ongoing experience in planning the public domain. The studio’s team assists municipalities and communities in integrating challenges of complex hybrid design in the urban space, and designs life spaces as open code given to interpretation, activation and change by its users. The team thus develops and studies tools of landscape, ecology and structures.

Nirit Binyamini Ben Meir, design and research artist. Her work combines ecological and technological systems to challenge the human approach with a look at power relations, bioethics and the impact of the Anthropocene age.

The exhibition is presented in the Liebling Haus Project Room, a space in which artists from various disciplines are invited to actively participate in a critical reflection on the question What is the White City? as part of an alternative, collaborative and ongoing investigation of the White City as a platform for discourse regarding conservation, urbanism, identity and culture in the city. The Project Room is the open end of the permanent exhibition at Liebling Haus, which tells the story of the White City as the point of departure for a history in the making. It presents an opportunity for creatives to offer different points of view and possible narratives concerning this question and to form together an alternative timeline of the present. The works exhibited in the Project Room were chosen through an open call process.