http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/551570.html
High hopes for Hiriya
By Esther Zandberg
Cooperation between the Bracha Foundation, which initiates and supports social and environmental projects, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art has yielded another exhibition - the second in the past five years - that deals with the Hiriya landfill. The exhibition, which opens on Thursday, is an advanced stage on the road toward rehabilitating the mountain of garbage as part of the Ayalon Park, and turning it into a "green" recreation area - from an ecological and landscape point of view. The director of the foundation, Martin Weyl, has been working on forwarding this initiative for more than five years, and he is the curator of the exhibition, along with Irit Hadar from the museum.
The exhibition will present proposals that were submitted to the Hiriya Park planning competition initiated by the foundation, with the focus on the plan submitted by German landscape architect Peter Latz, which took first place. Latz and his team have already begun their practical work on planning the park, in coordination with the Dan Region Sanitation Union, and in cooperation with the District Planning and Building Committee in Tel Aviv that is promoting the planning of the entire Ayalon Park.
Cooperation between the museum and foundation vis-a-vis Hiriya began with an exhibition that was held at the museum's Helena Rubinstein Pavilion in 1999 and presented conceptual proposals by Israeli and international artists and architects for the rehabilitation of the site. As reported at the time, the Bracha Foundation invested a small fortune in the exhibition.
The event came across at the time as just another spoiled, self-obsessed affair emerging from the Tel Aviv art world, romanticizing the garbage rather than the more serious effort to advance the nascent zoning plan for the Ayalon Park and a campaign against the construction plans that were being made for it.
In retrospect, however, the conceptual art project served as a real catalyst for advancing the outline of the plan for the Ayalon Park. It, together with the professional meetings that came in its wake at the initiative of the foundation, certainly contributed significantly to placing the issue on the public agenda and kick-starting the process that eventually led to its initial approval in November last year.
No less importantly, the exhibition significantly helped to change the image of Hiriya in the public consciousness - from being a symbol of an area of ecological disaster into a place associated with terms such as "open public expanse," "park" and even "beauty."
The exhibition brought to the fore the inherent potential in rehabilitating "brown fields" such as waste dumps, abandoned industrial areas, contaminated land and crime-infested urban areas, and turning them into active public expanses.
In the post-industrial age and in a world in which open areas are continually disappearing, this today is a central issue in the field of urban and environmental planning, and a subject that has recently moved from being behind the scenes in the area of infrastructure to center stage of the cultural world.
Currently, for example, the New York Museum of Modern Art is holding a first-of-its-kind exhibition of projects in the field of urban planning that are based primarily on "fixing" brown areas around the world. Among the projects that have won special attention is the urban park planned by Latz on the site of an abandoned metalworks plant near the city of Duisberg, in Germany's Ruhr region. The park won Latz international renown, and one can hope that his work at Hiriya will achieve equal success.
The main principle in the planning of the park in the Ruhr region, and other similar projects, is the preservation of traces of the past, in recognition of their importance in the process of rectifying and understanding the history of the place. Hiriya also has a past of its own, and traces of it will indeed be preserved. First and foremost, the silhouette of the garbage mountain in the planning directives is defined (in an exaggeration that borders on the ridiculous) as a "national symbol." It is regrettable to discover, nevertheless, that other traces - of the Arab village of Al-Hiriya that existed at the site until 1948 and on whose land the mountain was erected - have been erased from the new planning.
On the festive occasion of the exhibition of the plans for the Hiriya Park, and in light of the approval of plans for the Ayalon Park (an approval that doesn't absolutely guarantee its future against the threat of construction), it is worthwhile mentioning that ever since the site ceased to serve as a dump some seven years ago, the garbage did not begin to evaporate but is being buried in the Negev - the country's backyard that does not have foundations and art museums to look after its fate.