"Tor" is a project inspired by the experiences of Jewish-Muslim coexistence, focusing on the area of the Damascus Gate. This location, situated between West and East Jerusalem, serves as the most important pedestrian gateway and acts as a bottleneck between the Old City and the New City. Especially during business hours, as well as Jewish and Muslim prayer times, the gate is highly frequented. Nowhere else do the diverse groups of Israeli and Palestinian societies, along with traditionally dressed representatives of the Christian churches residing in the Old City, encounter each other so closely and diversely as at the Damascus Gate.
Despite being a meeting place, this location is also a site of tension. The modern, secularized Israeli population is almost entirely absent here. The Damascus Gate has been an ongoing site of violent confrontations between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers and police, which have not decreased even with the local police stations installed in 2021.
The project reflects the ambiance of the 10 square meters around the Damascus Gate, capturing the moods of commerce and daily life while also providing a commentary on the ongoing tension at this site.
For the project, I captured the location using an Insta360 X3 and input the preprocessed images into the AI tool LumaLabs to create a vague 3D representation of the place. The unique style of the NeRF (Neural Radiance Field), which exhibits blurry and ghostly artifacts, contributes to the memory-esque aesthetics.
