Introduction | A Manifest of Transitions

 

We are in the year 2023. Only twenty-three years separate us from the end of the previous millennium. We are at the beginning of moving into the next thousand years, and we are accelerating. Now it seems that something has occurred: This is the moment to reveal the transition spaces.

 

The world around us is accelerating its rate of change, Processes progress quickly and change direction at an unpredictable rate. Accelerated by the power of technology, the challenges are multiplying in an increasingly crowded world. This is a world where territories and people have never been closer digitally and farther from one another ideologically. This is a world where the transitions between utopia and dystopia, between the individual and the whole, between man and machine, between man and nature, between the existing and the new, shrinks for parts and expands in others, changing its shape with rapid acceleration. Are we keeping up?

 

Transitions have been a phenomenon that engaged humanity since the dawn of time. Transitions come in different forms:  as time, as migration, social changes, identity change, gender transition, technological transition… It seems that transitions are intensifying even further today. Transitions are not stable. Every action we take has the power to reverberate endlessly and change its form. The transition contains elements of contrast and change, that are not interfering with each other or requiring us to make a choice between them, even if their ends are eternal and unchangeable. People are abandoning their past, cities are being built at record speed, ecological disasters dictate rethinking, intersections become protest spaces, technological promises create a new world order. This acceleration is on an unparalleled scale, and it is producing global transitions. This essential process gave birth to a new reality of an existence that has not yet been defined, with an existential orientation, which splits the space-time continuum, changes its shape, accelerates the rate of its change and gives priority to the dimension of transition.

 

 

The end-of-the-year exhibition at the Bezalel School of Architecture seeks to reveal these issues in the form of transitions and changes and invites us to discuss them with open, two-sided attention, at all scales and at all levels and issues that challenge today's reality, through the students' point of view.