The Jerusalem Design Week is an initiative of the Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage and the Jerusalem Development Authority. The event is being supported by the Jerusalem Municipality and managed by the Ran Wolf Company and has been initiated and led by the Hansen House Center for Design, Media and Technology since 2011. Hansen House hosts a spectrum of diverse activities throughout the year to promote the design sector in Jerusalem and Israeli designers in general. Jerusalem Design Week is the main event in the tapestry of Hansen House’s annual activities and constitutes its flagship project, as the largest and most influential public design event in Israel. In 2016, the Jerusalem Design Week expanded and became an international event that takes place in several locations throughout Jerusalem, and offers a multitude of events, performances and local and international design exhibitions. Each year, the Jerusalem Design Week focuses on a central theme that examines unique Jerusalem and Israeli situations having international relevance, with the idea that the unique cultural landscape in Israel allows it to serve as a living laboratory exploring urgent global issues, and with the belief that design must respond to these issues
The Hansen House – Center for Design, Media and Technology was built in 1887 as a leper asylum by the Protestant community of Jerusalem. The designer of the structure was German architect Conrad Schick. In 1950, the site was purchased by the Jewish National Fund, and continued to serve its original purpose until 2000. In 2009, the building was handed over to the municipality of Jerusalem city, for the purpose of converting it into an interdisciplinary center. The project of restoring and converting the building started in 2011, under the management of the Jerusalem Development Authority. In 2014, the impressive historic building was opened to the public as a center for design, media and technology. In its new purpose, the Hansen House is used for cultural activities, including exhibitions, film screenings and advance fabrication labs. In addition to those, the building plays host to Graduate programs for the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, the Ma’amuta Art Research Center, the web journal Erev-Rav, various research and art groups in the fields of design and technology, and the Jerusalem Film & Television Fund. In 2017, the Ofaimme Farm for Sustainable Agriculture will open a café in the compound
Jerusalem Design Week 2018 team
Executive directors: Chen Gazit and Ran Wolf, Ran Wolf Ltd
Artistic director: Anat Safran
Chief curator: Tal Erez
Curatorial assistant: Rona Zinger
Production coordinator: Yael Hershkowitz
Media and marketing: Shira Ben-Simon Schonfeld, Ran Wolf Ltd
Technical production: FaZa- Heart & Mind Marketing
Event production: Ella Harel
Graphic design: Zohar Koren, Idan Am-Shalem, Eli Magaziner
Local PR: Idit Shiloah
International PR: Xhibition
Digital marketing: Studio Brief
Site Developer: felix007
In face of daily technological transformations that exceed even the wildest imaginations of sci-fi authors, in face of an economic and geopolitical situation which defeats the predictions of the best of experts, and in face of promising ideologies which shatter on the rocks of reality, it appears that the future is getting out of our hands. In such a maelstrom of uncertainty, we tend to become increasingly retrospective, searching for anchors to grab onto while we sail towards the unknown. In this relationship of the present with the past, and the position it will hold in the future, conservation as a tool and conservatism as an ideology play a key role. but time’s tides will not allow the familiar to stay static, and like a dorm of quantic uncertainty, any action we may take to keep it unchanged in the preset, thoroughly transforms it – be it in the baggage the past carries with it, in the context it operates in, or in its concrete social role.
Thus, our dialogue with the past deeply effects the future. and the future is what we set our sights on. “Conserve”, the theme of the 2018 edition of Jerusalem Design Week, asks to deconstruct the terms conservation and conservatism into their core features and examine the role design plays in them in various disciplines under three main sub-themes: “The garden”, which deals with conservation and the environment, “The library” – conservation and culture – and “The market” dealing with conservation and society.
Within these categories, design week asks whether design is as radical and groundbreaking as we sometime tend to imagine, or is it a tool to fixate existing social conventions? What are the mechanism we use to uphold the past? and above all – what do we choose to conserve, and who is the one making that choice?
