This issue is an additional product of the research group “Resilience and Agility” that worked throughout 2022 as part of a collaboration between the Institute for Public Presence at the Center for Digital Art, and Tmu-na Theater. The project began from a meeting between the two of us, and a strong desire to work together. We thought the research groups project at the Institute for Public Presence would be a good platform for a collaboration. Erez suggested playing with the concept of “agility” and Avital added “resilience”. We intuitively sensed that there is a great deal to be done with these two deeply connected concepts. We felt that they were an excellent point of departure for a transdisciplinary journey that could move between different perspectives and practices – in accordance with the emergent methodology at the Institute.

It is not easy to deconstruct these two concepts, Resilience and Agility, they have multiple and close meanings, they permeate each other, at times expanding their meaning, at others multiplying it. Some dictionaries (Hebrew and English) use the very same words to interpret and expand use of these concepts in the world:

Agility is a quality associated with movement and speed, flexibility and nimbleness, ability to adapt and change quickly and easily in response to external change.

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly, to be flexible, cope with adversity, and adapt to new and stressful events.

Both concepts are located on the continuum between flexibility and rigidity, speed and coping, movement and stability. They can be viewed through the elasticity-plasticity spectrum, which also contains flexibility and movement, adaptability and rigidity. In kinesiological thinking, the transition from elasticity to plasticity marks a point where movement stops. A ligament (connective tissue that connects bones to other bones) can lengthen or shorten in accordance with the body’s movement needs within the range of its elasticity. However, when it stretches too far, it transitions into a state of plasticity – very long but unable to resume its shorter state. In other words, its flexibility is impaired, and when flexibility is impaired, the body’s adaptability to an external situation, to a physical need, to an unexpected movement, is also impaired.

These concepts also appear in an additional semantic field that is associated with political action, struggle, and resistance. In a local context, the Palestinian national struggle is often translated into English as “resilience”, in terms of the Palestinians’ attachment to the land and contending with the catastrophe. In its more current appearances, it gains dynamic movement-based meanings. In these contexts, the concepts are charged with meanings of concrete space and time against protracted forces of harm and dispossession.

Thinking about this through the body accords a clear and familiar meaning to these two concepts, marks the wide spectrum of their impact, and the creative potential they bring to bear. Recent years have seen widespread use of these concepts in the business world, from a neoliberal perspective of product and profit, when contending with market crises, collapsing stock exchanges, the impact of crises (pandemics, storms, revolutions) on transportation of goods, production, output, and maximizing performance. This is neither new nor surprising. The most common use of the word “performance” is precisely in this context – the productivity, achievements, output that an individual or a company, and definitely a corporation, boasts of.

As with their multiple uses and meanings, the group’s meetings were thus characterized by numerous perspectives of the two concepts, perspectives stemming from the group members’ different practices and diverse bodies of knowledge. The meetings ranged from the spatial to the bodily, local and global, through utopian to dystopian urban planning, from a perspective that understands resilience as a signifier of strength, to a converse perspective that views resilience as an indicator of weakness. We moved from how the individual body contends with public space, to a discussion on the state’s mechanisms of control and regulation over a civilian population’s movements. We toured the urban space of Tel Aviv, visited a neuroscience laboratory at the Hebrew University, and foraged for edible plants in Holon’s Jessy Cohen neighborhood. We endeavored to engage with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, which at times created an eclectic and scattered feeling – we practiced flexibility in the face of our dissatisfaction and lack of knowledge.

A very special event concluded the group’s meetings: as part of A-Genre Festival at Tmu-na Theatre, we invited the audience to join us for an “End-of-the-World Brunch”, in which the group members presented the different perspectives we discussed in our closed meetings. As in any brunch, there were also refreshments, provided under the direction of the high priestess of urban foraging and food rescue, Hila Harel, who attended the group’s meetings, and was invited to prepare a menu that would be appropriate in form and content to the subject of our research.

Many of the ideas that were presented at the event appear in this issue in different variations, some serve as inspiration for continuing actions and collaborations between the group members, some of which we present here in the introduction as a starting point for a discussion. Michal Givoni opened the brunch event with a theoretical review of the notion of resilience, its development against the backdrop of the fall of utopian visions and organizing ideologies, and the rise of significant global challenges, such as the climate crises and the growing number of ecological disasters, which are its immediate manifestations. Resilience as the continuation of a crisis management policy at a time when the horizon is challenged, and waves of violence are constructed as an inseparable part of everyday life. The critique on the notion of resilience views it as the “minimalist response of neoliberal politics”, a form of privatization and abandonment of the population in the face of current challenges. Additionally, the perception of resilience contains an anesthetizing and degenerative element – rather than rallying to action, we hoard food, dig nuclear bomb shelters, and pray for the best. However, as Givoni herself stated at the conclusion of her presentation, we too propose not completely relinquishing the notion of resilience, not viewing it solely as an evil agent of an abandoning regime, but rather assuming ownership over it specifically because of the multiple possibilities it offers. The range of interpretations of Resilience and Agility presented in the various texts comprising this issue goes with and against the notion of resilience, formulates and opposes it, poses questions about durability, stability, and formulating a stance in the face of, and as part of, the current complex and conflictual reality.

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Hila Lotan presents her urban vision of resilience and agility in the modern era. She advises planners and users to change our mindset, abandon cars in favor of public transport, wide sidewalks, and shaded streets. To start implementing a people-centered approach whereby the city’s strength stems from smart use of smart infrastructures, urban leadership that encourages diversity, and a long-term view that will enable us to contend with the crises facing us in the future, following years of neglect and excessive development. The conversation between Yoav Egozi and Itai Doron continues along the same line, and engages with the role of art institutions in a crisis world. The point of departure for their conversation is the Transition movement, which proposes localism as a solution and response to the ills visited upon us by progress. The art institution as a physical place around which a community can be built, and which sustains itself culturally and spiritually, as well as materially. Localism enables flexibility and adaptation to the community’s needs, and within it the art institution as a public body becomes the public arena and the public space where needs are examined and addressed in practice.

The issue of flexibility also features in the heart of the action undertaken by Emi Sfard and Keren Schvetz, who propose a contemporary interpretation of Aesop’s fable The Reed and the Olive Tree. In their graphic fable they challenge the existing social order’s perception of resilience, and examine the possibility of the many contending with the blows striking them by means of flexibility and solidarity. Michal Samama thinks about the physical presence of the body in urban public space, and seeks to (somewhat) relinquish uprightness. To this end she invites Buster Keaton, master of flexibility and contending with the world’s hardships, and transports us into the iconic scene in the 1928 silent film Steamboat Bill, in which Keaton struggles against the ravages of the weather, repeatedly falls down and gets up, battered by the wind, dragged across the floor, breaks down, collects himself, and finally rescues his sweetheart and frees her father from jail. Alongside Keaton’s boundless flexibility, Samama also proposes the possibility of advancing differently in the city, relinquishing the vertical position, and surrendering to a horizontal one that moves across the surface, and views the city from there. The presence of the body, its abilities and qualities, are also the point of departure for the visual essay by Tal Alperstein. Alperstein engages with the relationship between bodies and items of furniture around them. How the living body is exposed precisely when it attempts to become inanimate. It is when movement stops and the body freezes that the effort exerted by the muscles is evident. They begin to tremble uncontrollably, to contract, and considerable energy is wasted. The usability of the furniture in rooted in it being static, whereas the body is at its peak when all its systems maintain their dynamic quality.

Movement and body also feature in the text by Alma Katz, which engages with the Israeli perception of resilience, and how this perception is translated into a complex system of permits, restrictions, regulation, and control over the bodies, movement, and life of Palestinians. Contrary to the Israeli perception of resilience, which is based on Israel’s perception of itself as being under constant threat, Katz shows the state’s violent and aggressive side. In contrast to the declarations about resilience based on categorical distinctions between outward and inward and between enemy and citizen, is the cynical reality where these distinctions collapse into each other, borders remain ambiguous, and the categories become flexible. Thus, the Palestinian work force can continue to be exploited, but without enabling freedom of movement or employment, thus preserving the worker as an enemy, and creating pressure mechanisms on an entire population. The text by Chen Alon engages with the same occupied and violent local space, but from a reverse perspective, one that focuses on resilience as an act of resistance by Palestinians and Israeli activists against the state’s power and violence. In a personal text that traces traumatic experiences of the violence attending resistance, resilience is embodied in the possibility of correcting and healing that utopian artistic actions bring to the activistic operating space.

There is no correct order to read this issue, the movement between the texts forms connections that expand the meaning of the concepts with which we engaged. The invitation remains open to formulate a dynamic stance that contains flexibility, but without relinquishing the desire for resilience, and a firm stance in the face of the challenges currently confronting us.

Group members: Tal Alperstein, Avital Barak, Dr. Alon Chen, Itai Doron, Yoav Egozi, Dr. Michal Givoni, Alma Katz, Hila Lotan, Dr. Erez Maayan Shalev, Michal Samama, Samira Saraya, Keren Schvetz, Emi Sfard