Jaffa: Fragments from a Continuous Modernity, Palestinian Museum. Curated by Inass Yassin, 2021.
With the end of the mandate between 1946 and 1948, the municipality of Jaffa, headed by Youssef Haykal its last Palestinian mayor, hired the British trained Egyptian architect Ali Al-Meligy Massoud to plan for the city of Jaffa an alternative “civilized” and “modern” masterplan as potentially the last attempt at convincing the British that Jaffa can remain Palestinian and simultaneously “civilized”[1], the plan was not executed, and Youssef Haykal famously warned the residents of Jaffa to evacuate before another massacre took place.
Dima Srouji's work explores the plans of Jaffa that never were, in an artistic experiment of the urban and architectural condition of the late Mandate period, in light of the rise of Tel Aviv, the White City. The work is a series of visuals looking at the plan of Jaffa, by the Egyptian architect Ali Al-Meligy Massoud, which he planned beginning in 1946 and published in 1948, while the Nakbah was taking place. The artwork presents scenes from the Jaffa Development Plan through a critique of the Modernist architectural representation included in the plan that ironically embraces its erasure, as a critique of the idea that we need to be “modern” to be “free”.
