White City Black Flag: Responding to Overtourism Through Artistic Hosting

This research joins the call to create new political eco-systems and sustainable cultural interfaces in response to overtourism in cities, addressed through contemporary art. Focusing on Artistic Hosting (AH), a hyper-local micro residency model and artistic practice which reappropriates the home as a critical base for cultural, social, and urban production, in counter response to Neoliberal paradigms, it asks what is the potential role of AH in forming sustainable and critical frameworks of urban hospitality? This question is addressed through the Resident-City game, an interactive art installation and board game created in collaboration with artist Sally Kryzstal in 2021, at HaDira Residency at the Liebling House – the White City Center in Tel-Aviv-Yafo in a conserved Bauhaus building. Urban memory and imagination as well as alternative frameworks of hospitality and heritage converge at this discursive site via input of diverse urban players, suggesting eco-systems in response to neoliberal adversities and ramifications of overtourism in Tel-Aviv-Yafo, which was declared in 2003 by UNESCO as the “White City Architecture” world heritage site and announced in 2021 as the most expensive city in the world. The chapter conclusions are framed by drastic national events which threaten the mere existence of home – the judicial reform threatening Israel’s Democracy and the outbreak of the deadly Israel-Hamas war.