A Tender City A Critical Installation after Wandering in Wadi Salib Bilu Blich 19.5.2005 – 30.6.2005 Wadi Salib is a place that smacks of the past, of distant strata and occurrences. Today the place is emptied, stricken, closed, dilapidating. Sealed buildings and ruins are strewn throughout the Wadi, as well as scraps and junk. Its floating memory is a weakening value. The place that was organic and lively years ago, has suffocated to death. The city and the neighborhood have no "fortifications" or "protective walls" of their own. Over the years the signs of the past have been violated; buildings, paths, vegetation, and nature have been erased. The inhabitants and pedestrians are insignificant. The road is the tool, the sword, the dragon that tears the environment. The place becomes an arena of absorption in motion and speedy emission. The authorities account for these measures by the logic of "market forces" of savior and offender. The erasure of the past has obliterated the poetics, the mystery, time, the pain, identity, history, the colors, the people. This assault on the environment is also known as "urban development," essentially denoting construction of roads, walls, levels, passageways. Concrete-lined fenced gardens denote progress. The installation Tender City is the fragment of a lost dream combined with a focused view of reality. It analogizes a final soft stroke before complete strangulation, embedding signs of fantasies and phantoms that dissolve with the area's final clearing. We have been briefly left with a soft, feeble, dissolving, servile, disappearing city. My wandering in the area started in the winter of 2003/04 and continued intermittently for over a year. It was documented in a protocol where the road is the protagonist. -- Bilu Blich