Speculative Tourism: Jerusalem 2017
The first edition of Speculative Tourism was commissioned by the 2017 Jerusalem Design Week. It consists of 8 tours created by local authors, activists, artists and journalists.
Below is the text we wrote to introduce the project in 2017:
Jerusalem lives and breathes the history of its rich and glorious past days. In fact it sometimes feels impossible to even think of Jerusalem in terms of the present, let alone the future. But the city’s future does not only concern the diverse communities of its residents. Jerusalem’s future is a critical facet of the whole region’s future, and possibly the world at large.
50 years after the war that reunited the city and further divided its inhabitants, we look 50 years into the future and embark on multiple guided tours through Jerusalem’s futures. A (ethnically, genderly, religiously, politically...) diverse group of authors guide audio tours through their own speculative future Jerusalems. Each tour features multiple locations in the future city. Our tour guides write and record audio guides for each of these locations. Each of the tours is made available to our tourists through a dedicated mobile app. To discover the future, the tourists will have to physically visit each future tourist spot. Only then will the future tour unravel, exposing its unique speculative narrative.
How would elderly Mark Zuckerberg and family say goodbye to Jerusalem before leaving to Mars? Is the redemption really as desirable as we pray it is? How would a "birthright trip" for Palestinian diaspora youth might look like? What if we divided the city to over and under-ground? And maybe the messiah is not really a man? Neither a woman?
