Eyal Weizman

Israel's Architecture of Occupation

Hollow Land

أرض جوفاء

Drawing from an abundance of original research, and based on the principle of the "lesser evil"--the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice--the author charts the latest manifestation of this age-old idea.

The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza

A new form of investigative practice that uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction.

Violence at the Threshold of Detectability

Forensic Architecture

Alessandro Petti

Sandi Hilal

Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (Program) Staff

Architecture after Revolution

Ines Weizman

“Önce-ve-sonra görüntülerinin günümüzdeki yaygınlığı dünya algımızı şekillendiriyor. Bu durum şüphesiz ilgimizi fail insanın temsilinden toprakların ve mimarlığın temsiline kaydırarak yeni bir boyut açıyor; bu da mekânsal analizi asli bir politik aygıta dönüştürüyor. Ne var ki, önce-ve-sonra görüntülerinin en can alıcı yanı, aralarındaki gediktir; bu gedikler de basit yorumlara mukavemet eder.” 

Eyal Weizman Forensic Architecture (adli mimarlık), Ines Weizman ise Centre for Documentary Architecture (belgesel mimarlık merkezi) adlı disiplinlerarası araştırma kolektiflerinin kurucu direktörü olarak son yıllarda bütün dünyada ses getiren çalışma ve projelere imza atıyor. Mekânsal analiz ve mimari ifade araçlarının adli ve politik olaylarda devreye sokulması, etkin ve yaratıcı biçimde kullanılması üzerine teorik ve uygulamalı çalışmalarıyla özellikle mekânsal veri değerlendirme alanında çığır açtıkları söylenebilir. 
Weizmanlar bu kitapta ise, hem bir temsil aracı hem de analiz malzemesi vazifesi gören önce-ve-sonra görüntülerine odaklanıyor. Çarpıcı örnekler üzerinden önce-ve-sonra görüntülerinin tarihine bakıyorlar, özellikle uydu teknolojilerinin bu temsil formuna kazandırdığı yeni perspektife işaret ediyorlar, bir yandan da bu görüntülerde ve temsil teknolojilerinde somutlaşan politik veçhelerin izini sürüyorlar.

Felaketin Mimarisini Belgelemek

Önce ve Sonra

Paola Antonelli

Alejandro Zaera-Polo

David Benjamin

Kevin Slavin

Architecture and Research by The Living

Now We See Now

Documenting the Architecture of Disaster

Before and After

Fazal Sheikh

The village of al-'Araqib has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 70 times in the ongoing "Battle over the Negev"--the Israeli state campaign to uproot the Palestinian Bedouins from the northern threshold of the desert. Unlike other frontiers fought over during the Palestine conflict, this one is not demarcated by fences and walls but by shifting climatic conditions. The threshold of the desert advances and recedes in response to colonization, cultivation, displacement, urbanization and, most recently, climate change. In his response to Sheikh's "Desert Bloom" series, Israeli intellectual and architect Eyal Weizman's essay incorporates historical aerial photographs, contemporary remote sensing data, state plans, court testimonies and 19th-century travelers' accounts, exploring the Negev's threshold as a "shoreline" along which climate change and political conflict are entangled.

Colonialism as Climate Change in the Negev Desert

Fazal Sheikh/Eyal Weizman: The Conflict Shoreline

Hollow Land is a groundbreaking exploration of the political space created by Israel's colonial occupation. In this journey from the deep subterranean spaces of the West Bank and Gaza to their militarized airspace, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of the Occupied Territories into a theoretically constructed artifice, in which all natural and built features function as the weapons and ammunition with which the conflict is waged. Weizman traces the development of these ideas, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualization of military defense during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations. In exploring Israel's methods to transform the landscape and the built environment themselves into tools of domination and control, Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

In recent years, a little-known research group named Forensic Architecture began using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups, NGOs, Amnesty International, and the UN. Beyond shedding new light on human rights violations and state crimes across the globe, Forensic Architecture has also created a new form of investigative practice that bears its name. The group uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction, as well as to cross-reference a variety of evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis, witness testimony, and crowd-sourcing. In Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, the group’s founder, provides, for the first time, an in-depth introduction to the history, practice, assumptions, potentials, and double binds of this practice. The book includes an extensive array of images, maps, and detailed documentation that records the intricate work the group has performed. Included in this volume are case studies that traverse multiple scales and durations, ranging from the analysis of the shrapnel fragments in a room struck by drones in Pakistan, the reconstruction of a contested shooting in the West Bank, the architectural recreation of a secret Syrian detention center from the memory of its survivors, a blow-by-blow account of a day-long battle in Gaza, and an investigation of environmental violence and climate change in the Guatemalan highlands and elsewhere. Weizman’s Forensic Architecture, stunning and shocking in its critical narrative, powerful images, and daring investigations, presents a new form of public truth, technologically, architecturally, and aesthetically produced. Their practice calls for a transformative politics in which architecture as a field of knowledge and a mode of interpretation exposes and confronts ever-new forms of state violence and secrecy.

Matthew Fuller

Today, artists are engaged in investigation. They probe corruption, state violence, environmental destruction and repressive technologies. At the same time, fields not usually associated with aesthetics make powerful use of it. Journalists and legal professionals pore over open source videos and satellite imagery to undertake visual investigations. This combination of diverse fields is what the authors call “investigative aesthetics”: mobilising sensibilities often associated with art, architecture and other such practices to find new ways of speaking truth to power. This book draws on theories of knowledge, ecology and technology, evaluates the methods of citizen counter-forensics, micro-history and art, and examines radical practices such as those of Wikileaks, Bellingcat, and Forensic Architecture. Investigative Aesthetics takes place in the studio and the laboratory, the courtroom and the gallery, online and in the streets, as it strives towards the construction of a new 'common sensing'. The book is an inspiring introduction to a new field that brings together investigation and aesthetics to change how we understand and confront power today.

Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth

Investigative Aesthetics

Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (Program)

The work presented in this book is an invitation to undertake an urgent architectural and political thought experiment: to rethink today's struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization; consequently, to rethink the problem of political subjectivity not from the point of view of a Western conception of a liberal citizen but rather from that of the displaced and extraterritorial refugee. You will not find here descriptions of popular uprising, armed resistance, or political negotiations, despite these of course forming an integral and necessary part of any radical political transformation. Instead, the authors present a series of provocative projects that try to imagine “the morning after revolution.” Located on the edge of the desert in the town of Beit Sahour in Palestine, the architectural collective Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) has since 2007 combined discourse, spatial intervention, collective learning, public meetings, and legal challenges to open an arena for speculating about the seemingly impossible: the actual transformation of Israel's physical structures of domination. Against an architectural history of decolonization that sought to reuse colonial architecture for the same purpose for which it was originally built, DAAR sees opportunities in a set of playful propositions for the subversion, reuse, profanation, and recycling of these structures of domination and the legal infrastructures that sustain them. DAAR's projects should be understood as a series of architectural fables set in different locations: an abandoned military base near Beit Sahour, the refugee camp of Dheisheh in Bethlehem, the remnants of three houses on the Jaffa beach, the uncompleted Palestinian Parliament building, the historical village of Battir, the village of Miska destroyed during the Nakba, and the red-roofed West Bank colony of Jabel Tawil (P'sagot) next to Ramallah-El Bireh.

Architecture After Revolution

Rafi Segal

David Tartakover

Bringing together essays and photographs by leading Israeli practitioners, and complemented by maps, plans and statistical data, A Civilian Occupation explores the processes and repercussions of Israeli planning and its underlying ideology. It demonstrates how, over the last century, planning and architecture have been transformed from everyday professional practices into strategic weapons in the service of the state, which has sought to secure national and geopolitical objectives through the organization of space and in the redistribution of its population. In fact, as the book shows, Israeli architecture has consistently provided the concrete means for the pursuit of the Zionist project of building a national home for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. As such, it is the first study to supplement the more familiar political, military and historical analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict with a detailed description of the physical environments in which it is played out. The banning of the first edition of this book by its original publisher was proof, if any were needed, that architecture in Israel, indeed architecture anywhere, can no longer be considered a politically naive activity: the politics of Israeli architecture is the politics of any architecture.

The Politics of Israeli Architecture

A Civilian Occupation

A través de los muros

Acclaimed exploration of the political space created by Israel's colonial occupation. From the tunnels of Gaza to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel's mechanisms of control and its transformation of Palestinian towns, villages and roads into an artifice where all natural and built features serve military ends. Weizman traces the development of this strategy, from the influence of archaeology on urban planning, Ariel Sharon's reconceptualization of military defence during the 1973 war, through the planning and architecture of the settlements, to the contemporary Israeli discourse and practice of urban warfare and airborne targeted assassinations. Hollow Land lays bare the political system at the heart of this complex and terrifying project of late-modern colonial occupation.

An exposé of Israel's reconceptualization of geopolitics in the West Bank, Gaza, and other occupied territories offers insight into their practices of control and transformation using natural and built features that violently reinforce domination-minded agendas while promoting urban warfare.

Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation

Acclaimed exploration of the political space created by Israel’s colonial occupation This new edition of the classic work on the politics of architecture—and the architecture of politics—appears on the fiftieth anniversary of the Six-Day War, which expanded Israel’s domination over Palestinian lands. From the tunnels of Gaza to the militarized airspace of the Occupied Territories, Eyal Weizman unravels Israel’s mechanisms of control and its transformation of Palestinian homes into a war zone under constant surveillance. This is essential reading for those seeking to understand how architecture and infrastructure are used as lethal weapons in the formation of Israel.

Groundbreaking exploration of the philosophy underpinning Western humanitarian intervention The notion of a humanitarian “lesser evil” has become instrumental in justifying the West’s military adventures. It informs obscene calculations determining how much collateral damage is permissible in conflict. It determines the minimum requirements of survival imposed upon an occupied territory. As Eyal Weizman shows in this brilliant exploration of forensic architecture, this can be seen in particular in the regime imposed upon Gaza by the state of Israel. Examining the damage following the 2010 bombardment, he pieces together the systematic process of destruction, revealing the political atrocity within the debris. The way he gathers together the evidence forces us to rethink our understanding of justice and human rights in the modern world.

Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza

The Least of All Possible Evils

Samaneh Moafi

Blake Fisher

One common feature of the wave of recent revolutions and revolts around the world is not political but rather architectural: many erupted on inner-city roundabouts. In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the "roundabout revolutions," and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath. Rereading the history of the roundabout through the vortices of history that traverse it, the book follows the development of the roundabout in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, to its subsequent export to the colonial world in the context of attempts to discipline and police the "chaotic" non-Western city. How did an urban apparatus put in the service of authoritarian power became the locus of its undoing? Today, as the tide of revolt that characterized the Arab Spring seems to ebb, when nations and societies disintegrate by brutal civil wars and military oppression, the series of revolutions might seem like Dante's circles of hell. To counter this counter-revolution, Weizman proposes that the immanent power of the people at the roundabouts will need to find its corollary in sustained work at round tables--the ongoing formation of political movements able to enact political change. The sixth volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series stems from Eyal Weizman's contribution to the Gwangju Folly II in 2013, an exhibition curated by Nikolaus Hirsch with Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chun for the Gwangju Biennale. Weizman and the architect Samaneh Moafi constructed a folly composed of seven roundabouts and a round table in front of the Gwangju train station, one of the central points in the events of May 1980. Critical Spatial Practice 6 With Blake Fisher and Samaneh Moafi Edited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus Miessen Featuring photography by Kyungsub Shin

Eyal Weizman

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