Optimistic Moments @ CBS – Next Station Launch
On Saturday night we launched the opening of WWSf Tel-Aviv, at the Central Bus Station:
Initial interventions for the Next Station popped-up like mushrooms in prominent locations within the Tel-Aviv Central Bus Station in the past weeks. These are 5 of over 30 works selected and developed with artists and companies responding to our open call this summer and digitized in an innovative in-building street-view panorama index.
A Vertical Tea Garden, Growing Mashrabiyeh, Lego Planters, Book Station and a Bamboo Geodome soon to be covered with plants. High exposure of these locations, on routes of tens of thousands of commuters and local residents, means constant interaction and random conversations.
Passengers stop and wonder, smell herbs and ask ; Homeless come to sleep ; Workers and shop owners offer help and coffee ; stray cats sniff and chew greens ; friends and volunteers drill and plant ; and municipality executives seek ways to adopt the initiative to push it forward.
Friends, participating artists and close partners came to eat fruit and nuts, on the vertical tea garden and free public library we’ve put up across the information desk, hear about what’s there and what will be during the next two months. Then we went on a tour, up to the highest and down to the lowest dungeons in the stomach of the concrete monster. Before climbing out through an underground arcade of unregistered night clubs for illegal foreign immigrants, we held a short meditation session within one of six abandoned cinema halls, dusty and dark, 20 meters beneath the street level.
Eerie and uncomfortable, disorienting and fascinating, dirty and attractive, this is how many experience the Central Bus Station, a sunken concrete ship within a sea of social, economical and architectural problems. Now, it’s dotted with a few marks of optimism.
