Neve Sha'anan - sketching the invisible citizens

December 10, 2014

Tel Aviv has many faces. As every big city, it has his respectable areas, new-build neighborhoods or nicely renovated historic areas. Sketching there is always nice, but sometimes you have a feeling of being in a well designed museum, lacking real life.

For our last Sketchcrawl we met at Neve Sha'anan street. This place isn't featured on the postcards or "must see" lists, many Israelis tend to avoid it. Just a few blocks from Tel Aviv’s luxury hotels and popular tourist locations you suddenly feel you're in different country, only Israeli that you see on the street are "tourists" - groups of photographers, looking for "nice" poverty pictures, bourgeois couples from North Tel Aviv, looking for authentic places to eat. Its real citizens are foreign workers mostly from Africa and Asia, the invisible residents we usually trying to ignore.

I wasn't sure if by bringing here our group of sketchers wouldn't make the Neve Sha'anan residents feeling a bit like an animals in the zoo. But as sketching is less piercing and more integrated with surroundings, often invites interacting, I was hoping we'll be accepted ok. And we did.

We started sketching trying to be together as a group, little by little spreading up over the street. All "local" residents where very friendly, looking at what we doing, some of them even asked us to draw them.

It was really special day of sketching and interacting, here are what I succeed to capture.