Gali Blay

CumLaude

Department: Social Design
Website: galiblay.com

A Journey through the Land of Panicutopia

Welcome to the travel log of anthropologist Maggie Rotberger,
a fictitious character created by Gali Blay, to tell the story
of her homeland, Israel. She calls it Panicutopia: a place where
panic and utopia collide. Maggie embarks on a journey to meet
people who choose to live off the grid, disconnected from
the state’s infrastructure, hiding from violence and suppression.
She finds a community in an underground cave system, and
another one living in zeppelins, high in the sky. The third one
has built a huge mobile camouflaged rock from old tanks
and crashed airplanes. Its inhabitants are a mixture of Jewish
Israelites and Muslim Palestinians who are living happily
together in their own infrastructure. They never have to leave
this comfortable sealed-off world to face the rest of society.
Although Maggie’s trip is an amazing adventure, at the end
she realises that as long as these communities are afraid of
the outside world, a proper dialogue will never occur.