Strip / Musrara

Strip / Musrara is part of Assor's ongoing “Strip” series, set in Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood. It is an attempt to create a living map that is both collective and subjective – a plurality of combined perspectives. Not a map of the exact measurements of the neighborhood, but of the experience of moving through it, together and alone, locals and strangers, intersecting and drifting apart. It is also a response to the prevalence of bird’s eye, all-knowing, absolute mapping and visualization tools so readily available now to anyone negotiating an unfamiliar cityscape, and to the increasingly blurred boundaries between maps, cinema, and “real time”. The form of this specific piece in the series is highly dependent on the unique stories and landscapes of Musrara.

Musrara is a neighborhood with few roads but many alleys, back passages and stairways, at the seam between east and west Jerusalem. Tenements and grand old Palestinian mansions, abandoned in 1948, are now occupied by a mix of people including young students, ultra-orthodox Jewish families, and the older generation of Morrocan Jews, who lived in the neighborhood since the 1950s, when it was a mostly derelict slum in a no-mans-land near the border. Some of these were responsible for starting the Israeli Black Panther movement in the 60s and 70s, fighting for equality for Israel’s Mizrahi population, whose influence lasts to this day.