Joseph Rabie
http://www.joetopia.org/
I was born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, where my only arms against Apartheid were satire and caricature.
I studied Architecture and Urban Design at the Technion, in Haifa, Israel, earning a BSc degree, cum laudé, in 1981. I was awarded the annual Sigmund Brawerman prize for my final project, about urban rehabilitation in Jerusalem. During my studies I was artistic director of the student newspaper, “Epsilon”. A premonitory caricature showed a settler in the occupied territories sowing the land with grenades. A student project with Sylvie Rabie developed experimental photographic work, under the direction of Professor Paul Hoenich. I left Israel when Ariel Sharon offered me a role in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
From 1982 to 1989 I worked in various architectural offices in Israel, Austria and France. My employers included: David Reznick in Jerusalem, in whose office I worked on the local Mormon University; Ram Carmi in Tel Aviv, who taught me that megalomania in urban design can be pursued with delicacy; Othmar Barth in Innsbruck for a commercial centre in harmony with the surrounding Dolomites; Roland Simounet in Paris, architect of the Picasso Museum, for whom designing using Le Corbusier’s Modulor was an essential part of the project brief; François Rodier, on a series of housing projects in and around Paris…
Since 2000 I have been working on interactive photography, dealing with both inhabited and nutural landscapes, expressed via an ongoing work called “Landscopes”. Most recently, several pictures from “Landscopes” were selected for the “EcoPoetics Online Digital Art Exhibition” that was part of the “Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival” in Ithaca, New York, in March-April 2006. In 2002 I was invited by Le Cube multimedia centre in Issy-les-Moulineaux (Paris) and the Art3000 Association (a pioneer in French net art), to make an outdoor, photographic, sound-driven installation, called the “Collido_scope” for the “1er Contact” Festival, that took place in October. This work was exhibited in February/March 2004 in the “Traverses-Video†Festival in Toulouse…..
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