About the project:
Have you ever seen loneliness? How can we do something about it if it we don’t know what it looks like? Constellation of Loneliness visualizes loneliness through a data-based digital city model. We don’t leave urban loneliness in spreadsheets and lengthy reports. We want to experience its presence, to understand its meanings, so we can challenge the structures and policies that contribute to it. We invite you step inside the digital city model, to move beyond analyzing social data. We are curious to find out what better insights, decisions, and choices we make when we experience data. Will they be more ethical? More creative? More wholesome?
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What makes a city? Its landscape? Its built environment? Its economy? For us the answer is simple, the city is its people, and its most important precious database is the social one. This is why we make social topographies, a method by which the dry numbers of statistical aggregation transform into compelling, provocative, and affect-inducing images. Once we see loneliness, the rehearsed rationalization mechanisms of the viewer are short-circuited, and a new emotional-visceral response may facilitate empathy, accountability, and creativity in articulating policy. In utilizing municipal data and bottom-up knowledge, we test the potential value of the aesthetic impact of visualized data for social research. We want to show you cities in ways you haven’t seen before.

What is urban loneliness? The sociology of cities marks the duality of the modern metropolis as simultaneously crowded and suffocating as well lonely and alienating. Privacy becomes a struggle as much as isolation. We are desperate to remain anonymous but must also be known to somebody. In the realities of the post-industrial, semi-computerized, proto-digital cities of today, while big data is used to manage the city and control its inhabitants from a distance, communities tend to migrate to online spheres and virtual terrains. Municipal services, groceries, and entertainment are all delivers to our flats with digital sterility.

In 2017-2021, authorities recorded an outstandingly high rate of bodies found in a state of advanced decay in the Hadar neighbourhood of Haifa. These people were found days, weeks, and sometimes months, after having passed away in their homes, completely alone. By visualizing the data sets that surrounds this tragedy, we explore what fragments of a fragile, ambivalent, humane, and emotional reality float through the anonymized numbers collected by the welfare services and the municipality on those who lived in social isolation and, and died in complete solitude. The information that gathers through the piling of GIS layers slowly becomes an image of isolated bright spots connected by lines on the dark background where the city map used to be.

The resulting image highlights the patterns of the database’s blueprint, its shadows. This data-shadow resembles a celestial constellation of stars, separated by countless time space, connected through the work of our imagination. The lines connecting the spots mark both the challenge of loneliness, but also the potential power of the community to reach out and bridge the distance.

The Smart Social Strategy Lab, headed by urban sociologist Dr Meirav Aharon Gutman and a team of performance researcher Dr Raz Weiner, designer Roni Mero, architect Batel Yossef-Ravid, landscape architect Ye’ela Gundar-Levi and architecture student Ilan Israelov.

Photography: Matteo Losurdo