Gili Hammer | Inside Jaffa’s Multisensory Cultural Centre

This remarkable place is the setting for new research by anthropologist Gili Hammer, who has spent years documenting how people with radically different ways of sensing and moving through the world manage to connect, create, and communicate together.

Hammer calls this ‘intersensory communication’, and her fieldwork uncovers it everywhere. On stage, actors read cues through vibrations in the floor, heat from stage lights, and the smell of baking bread woven into a performance about deafblind lives.

Backstage, morning briefings blend sign language, braille computers, spoken word, and touch. Even the employees’ cafeteria sugar jars come with a handwritten sign asking staff not to move them, so blind staff can find them by memory.

Hammer’s observations extend beyond the theatre itself. She recounts a hearing employee learning to navigate the building through a blind colleague’s directions, which relied on tactile floor markings, temperature, and a cat that always meowed at a certain corner. Such moments, Hammer suggests, expand how people understand their own senses.

The research also acknowledges real tensions: sign-language, spoken, and written languages are not always possible to bridge, and audiences sometimes struggle when performers’ disabilities aren’t visually obvious. Yet Hammer argues that the effort to bridge these differences matters in itself.

In a world often eager to sort people into fixed categories, this Jaffa centre offers something rarer: a working model of what it looks like to sense differently, together.