Book Launch: POMO Architecture of Privatization

Join us for a book launch to discuss the book and exhibition Land. Milk. Honey. with Dr. Zvi Efrat and the curators Dr. Rachel Gottesman, Tamar Novik, Ido Ginat, Dan Hasson, and Yehonatan Cohen.

The biblical image of Land of Milk and Honey has been perceived as a divine promise for abundance and prosperity throughout history. In the twentieth century, it evolved into an actionable strategy encompassing settlement, massive urbanization and infrastructure construction, industrial agriculture, and reshaping of the land. The book accompanies the exhibition displayed in the Israeli Pavilion at the 17 Venice Biennale of Architecture, exploring the country’s story from the points of view of animals and landscapes, highlighting modernity’s environmental and spatial effects. The book weaves an extensive collection of literary sources, historical documents, archive images, and original texts into an extraordinary story, both awe-inspiring and disturbing, about a space redesigned by ideology, religion, technology, and politics.

Authors and editors: Dr. Rachel Gottesman, Tamar Novik, Ido Ginat, Dan Hasson, and Yehonatan Cohen.

Aerial photo of Lake Hula, 1945, the British Army - courtesy of the Center for Computational Geography, Department of Geography, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.