יעל גבריאל
ולריה גבריליוק
Yael Gabriel
Valerie Gavriluk

The #meToo movement has opened the door for millions of victims of gender-based violence to speak up about abuse, violence, assault and harassment, while also igniting broader debates about the ability of our legal systems to deliver justice and service the victims. This project uses the hashtag and its sequels as tools for analyzing space and proposing alternative ways of dealing with tragedy.

When victims of gender violence courageously tell their story, they often describe the space it happened in. Was it dark? Was is closed? Was it a hotel? An office? The street? Their own house? Thus, the project evaluates the relationship between the built space and human behavior, the relevance of the context and its physical expression, layout and composition, and the experiences it can shape.

Can space influence its environment, for better or for worse?

An analysis of the tweets tagged with the hashtag #meToo reveals a direct relationship between the assault and its environment, exposing the programs and spaces that are more prone to endure gender-based violence in order to evaluate the implications that the built space might have in the development of events. The project begins by rebuilding and recreating the scenes of assaults in spaces based on the survivor’s statements and descriptions of the places. Furthermore, the representation of these events in a de-contextualized setting manages to highlight the relationship between the event and its environment, thus questioning, if a space can influence its the environment for worse, can it also influence it for the better?

As of today, we can’t control when, where or how violence happens, but we can change how we, as a society, choose to deal with it. #whyIdidntreport, a #meToo aftermath - through which victims expose the reasons to why they remain silent against legal authorities - exposes disbelief and lack of resolution in the cases along with a traumatic, neglected reporting process, as part of the main causes of silence within victims. Thus, we aim to position this subject in the center of our social dialogue, bring visibility, raise awareness, and demand responses from a system that is currently known to act with impunity.

The project seeks to reframe the reporting process and design an alternate system to the one existing now, through a new model/typology of reporting by centralizing all relevant programs - or their alternatives - into one place.

Therefore, the project proposes new reporting typologies in two different scales:
The Institutional scale - Report Center, designed as a government building within the Wohl Rose Garden in Jerusalem, located between the Supreme Court of Justice and the Knesset, (the Israeli Parliament). The singular location - a central area in the middle of the axis of all the institutional establishment of the country - , the grandiosity of the structure and the fact that the garden often serves as a place for protest, are the expression of the Manifesto: the need to put the discussion in the center of the stage.
The Individual scale - Report Station, proposes to place an “immediate report station” within areas more prone to gender-based violence, as determined by the #meToo tweet analysis.

The project holds the flag of a manifesto, in the search of shifting the way our society addresses this phenomenon - or avoids doing so - by not staying quiet and letting victims of violence around the world know that you are not alone, and that #WeDo believe you.