Marco metodológico

The Onya collective is the most recently formed collective discussed in this thesis. The original group consisted of graduate students from Bezalal Academy for Art and Design in Jerusalem. The students’ final projects expressed some of their interests in landscape interventions, place-making and sustainability, with one of them specifically focused on a plan to re-utilise the new CBS as a communal greenhouse in order to resolve the environmental damage caused by the station.18 _{Following the students’}

graduation at the end of 2013, these ideas gained concrete form as the

18 _{Avigail Rubini, a visual communication graduate, made a video guide for making a}

terrace garden. Robert Unger, an architecture graduate, designed a plan for transforming the new Central Bus Station into a communal greenhouse (Bezalel 2013; Sivan, 2013). Both Rubini and Unger started the collective. Today, according to the collective’s website, its members include: Gill Cohen, Yoav Shafranek, Melanie Lidman, Shira Degani, Shmulik Twig (also a member of Muslala), Smadar Ariel, Yana Feedman, Carmel Yaari, Eyal Feder, Amir Elron, Nadav Douani, Shir Talor, Heela Harel and Dana Mor.

group emerged into a collective and started to recruit other members, mostly designers, architects, artists and social and community workers. During 2014, Onya collaborated with several cultural and art institutions in south Tel Aviv. They built a vegi-bench, a vertical garden made out of industrial waste in their temporary studio at Artport gallery in Tel Aviv. It was part of the works shown in the gallery’s ‘The Infiltrators’ exhibition which examined the global and local state of asylum seekers. Another collaboration was with members of The Garden Library, mostly the children, where they cultivated plants on one of the concrete walls of the public shelter.

The most ambitious large-scale project of the Onya Collective was Next

Station (2014). It was a series of art and landscape interventions around the

station’s complex. The project was the product of an open call sent by the Onya collective to Storefront for Art and Architecture gallery in New York for their online/offline project “World Wide Storefront” which explored experimental civic and cultural initiatives from around the world (World Wide Storefront: online). Once selected, Onya released an open call inviting proposals that investigated the new CBS’s future. The emphasis of these proposals was on a commitment to issues of spatial and environmental justice, DIY techniques, sustainability, and participatory approaches (Onya, 2014). Onya received permission from the new CBS’s management to operate within a designated route, as well as to use one of the empty spaces on the seventh floor as a studio. The round windows within this space gave it the feeling of a boat (Onya means boat in Hebrew) from which the collective

took its name.19 _{After several months of work, Next Station was launched}

between October and November 2014. It consisted of more than thirty installations that were located around the new CBS. The success of the event brought many visitors to one of the most unpopular places in Tel Aviv, encouraging the new CBS director to give Onya the open space of one of the permanently closed entrances to the new CBS, in order to transform it into a a communal working and gardening space. This space, now called The

Ramp (2014-ongoing) occasionally hosts cultural events and workshops.20

During this time Onya developed other landscape interventions in other locations. For example, they have worked in the Diamond Exchange District between Ramat Gan and Tel Aviv (2016) and in the industrial area of Jerusalem (2017), where they conducted fieldwork on the environmental conditions of the spaces, and offered temporary and permanent solutions for issues such as a lack of shaded and green space.21 _{However, their main}

focus is around the area of south Tel Aviv and most specifically the new CBS. One of Onya's goals is to transform the space they received from the new CBS director into a multicultural community centre, similar to The Garden

Library, but with more emphasis on urban agriculture and sustainability,

much like Muslala’s The Terrace. In contrast to Muslala and The Garden

Library, whose long experience and concrete aims managed to transform

their spaces into dynamic and lively communal centres, Onya is still struggling to define long term goals, especially their responsibility over their

19 _{According to an interview with one of Onya members (17.07.2018).} 20 _Ibid.

21 _{Information of Onya’s projects is accessable on the collective’s website}

space in the new CBS. Amongst the current difficulties Onya as a collective is facing are the different directions the members are interested in. For example, some are interested in artistic interventions and some in taking more communal roles. Other difficulties are the lack of senior residents to collaborate with any activity that validates the new CBS, as well as finding partners from the foreign communities whose unstable status in Israel makes it difficult from them to take part in such initiatives.22 _{This current crossroads}

that the Onya collective is facing is discussed in the fourth chapter from two positions: multiculturalism in south Tel Aviv, and promoting sustainable approaches to urban planning. As these are issues that concern, for example, the ongoing work in The Garden Library, and of the Muslala collective, Onya provides another perspective from which to explore the implementation of artistic, social and sustainable visions in different environments, as well as the different positions artists take when it comes to filling the gaps in provision on issues both the public and the private sector refrain from.