Transcriber: Audrey Lesage Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Imagine, if you will, the following scene.
It's Friday night and you are looking to go to a movie.
You call a few friends, maybe post on Facebook
and ask people about movies they've recently seen.
A typical answer would usually sound something like this :
"Oh! It's a wonderful movie, it was truly amusing!"
Or : "Dude, it's such a depressing film,
I was sad for weeks! "
In the information age that we live in,
we are in a constant overflow of options and information.
This makes us, as a society,
categorize our world by metadata, details,
things such as genre, creator, year of creation.
But as people, we often tend to tag our world
by something completely different:
the emotional experience it steers in us.
Will it make us happy, will it make us sad,
will it inspire us or will it bore us?
Imagine if someone would say in response to my previous question:
"Dude, it's an 89-minute long Julia Roberts romantic comedy
made in the USA in 2001!"
Can you imagine that?
I think not.
I'm here to talk to you today about a place and a method
that challenges this conflict
and it challenges also many of our everyday paradigms.
Neve Sha'anan is the most difficult neighbourhood in South Tel Aviv.
Famous for the central bus station it witholds,
it's a magnet for drugs, crime and sex workers.
In the last decade,
it has also become the unquestionable centre
of the migrant communities in South Tel Aviv.
Unconscious to this complexity,
the neighbourhood suffers from a severe lack
of cultural and educational institutes.
It has no public library, no afternoon youth centre,
no movie theater.
Especially, not one that can deal with the complexities
of this multicultural neighbourhood.
In light of this reality,
a collective of artists named ARTEAM,
decided to found a wonderful place.
These artists were Hadas Ophrat,
Romy Achituv, Marit Benisrael, Tali Tamir and Yoav Meiri.
The place they founded is the wonderful place
that I've had the privilege of managing for the last year and a half:
The Garden Library.
They did this out of the belief that art and culture are
a basic human right of every human being,
and that art, as a way of communication,
can help bring people from different cultures together.
The library is an open space, comprising of two bookcases
in the middle of a public garden.
and has 3,500 books in 16 different languages.
It has developed over the years
to include an after-school program for kids,
a very active art and culture program,
and an educational centre for the residents of the neighbourhood.
In general, it has become one of the most culturally active
public spaces in Tel Aviv.
For me, it's truly inspiring to see the people that we've come to be blind to,
the caregiver, the dishwasher, the street cleaner as active actors
in the creation and consumption of literature and art.
From the very beginning,
ARTEAM set out to break away from the rules of the library system
and make a place that celebrates its patrons, their culture,
and manifests the values of an open society.
This is how an indexing system came to be.
We call it "Emotional Score" and it's very simple, almost intuitive.
Every book, on its back cover,
has a sticker just like the one you see up on the screen.
When a reader brings back the book, he's asked:
"Which of the following emotions best describes your experience with this book?"
And out of his response, a sticker is put on the outside cover of the book
and the book is put back in place in the right feeling section.
By doing this, we achieve three different things.
First, we deal with the conflict that I mentioned in the beginning.
We categorize our world by feelings and not by details.
Second, we challenge many of the difficulties
that we have with the multicultural society of library patrons.
By using abstract notions such as feelings denoted by universal colours,
we can overcome
the very very difficult language barrier this society suffers from.
And third, and this is I think the most exciting part,
we use a method popular in the digital world
in a real world environment: User Generated Content.
What actually happens is that the library patrons
influence the way the library looks, the library feels
and by using this beautiful visualization app
that Romy Achituv created,
we can complete a full cycle
and actually let people around the world
tap into the emotions and feelings of this interesting community.
This method can be easily applied to almost anything that needs cataloging.
All you need to do is choose your list of feelings,
choose your denoters and you can be on your way.
You are very welcomed to contact us
at The Garden Library for any assistance
or go ahead yourself.
One last thing.
I believe that this cataloging system is strictly linked
to the way we should view the society of library patrons.
Only when we let go of the metadata about these people,
that as migrant communities suffer from severe stereotyping and racism,
only when we don't see the skin complexity,
the language, the origin,
only then can we have a truly meaningful and inspirational experience
with these people.
In the picture behind me, you see two of my friends
holding an article in an Israeli newspaper
about a theater performance they created.
I would like to thank all of the beautiful people
that helped this place exist, The Garden Library.
And especially, Romy Achituv for all his assistance with this presentation.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)