Project Lead: Lia Tarachansky 

Collaborators: Zochrot's Decolonial Augmented Reality Workshop 

Year: 2022

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Note: To experience the AR walk, you need to be on-location in Manshiyyah, today known as the Tel Aviv Beach Promenade. 

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In this project, Tarachansky collaborated with Zochrot. She led an eight-week workshop on the political uses and potential uses of Augmented Reality in decolonization in Israel/Palestine. The workshop was organized by Zochrot, an Israeli organization working on teaching the Nakba and on decolonization through a variety of creative and activist means. 
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Augmented Reality is a new media that makes possible the overlay of virtual elements onto the physical reality via smart phones. Using the phone’s camera, AR can add data, 2D images, animation, or 3D objects, augmenting the view of the real world with endless virtual possibilities. Examples include everything from face masks to overlays of historic monuments no longer present in the real landscape, to political interventions with significant locations.
 

In the workshop, participants co-researched and then co-created an AR tour of Manshiyyah, a Palestinian village that once stood on the coast of the Medietrranean, just north of the historic city of Jaffa. In 1948 it was attacked by Zionist militias and ethnically cleansed. A decade later, it was razed to the ground to make way for the Tel Aviv beach promenade. The co-created tour superimposes the destroyed Palestinian localities throughout the Promenade, using the municiality's own promotional materials to show the colonial history its parks mask. The tour then incorporates stories of displacement by the Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour and decolonial imaginaries by Israeli designer Amit Ben Haim.

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The maps are courtesy of the Palestine Open Maps project.