For a moment I thought I was at a VJ show at night in the Berlin underground or New York: music was played in the tunnel that connects Bat Galim with Kiryat Eliezer in Haifa, a huge projector projected the graffiti image planned for the wall at the end. The truth is, the tunnel offers a good place for scenes of this kind, and so I take my hat off to the social worker from the Haifa Municipality who made this cool project possible with the budgeting of ‘partnership guards’ and the residents of the Kiryat Eliezer neighborhood.
Today, Wednesday, March 27, 2024, 15 residents registered on the website of the Haifa Municipality painted the painting together with the artist, a resident of Masada Street in Haifa. The artist drew the outlines of the work, the residents filled it with paint. This is the plan.
The artist
Adi Yonatan Cohen, who after the October 7th massacre immortalized the portrait of Rachel, the heroine of the south, on Komoi Street, will guide the painting of the graffiti together with residents who planned for the tunnel.
Adi Yonatan Cohen:
The association ‘Partnership Keepers’ works to prevent escalation in mixed cities. She funded the mural. It shows a figure of a girl or a boy whose origin is not clear. On the left side appears a background of traditional Arab fabric of embroidered dresses, on the right a background indicating tiles from Jerusalem with Jewish symbols.
the tunnel
The tunnel connecting Kiryat Eliezer and Bat Galim under the Bat Galim train station is an important road for the hundreds of residents who pass through it every day on their way to the markets of Kiryat Eliezer, to their homes or to the beaches of Bat Galim. Pirate graffiti is often painted on its walls, but the municipality takes care to remove them, to maintain some level of cleanliness in the neglected tunnel. This is an important breakthrough, that now the municipality mediates art and adds color and interest, one that also has an important political message of coexistence.
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