Arena of Speculation (Critical conjecture on the spatial futures of Israel-Palestine) is a remarkable platform about the Palestinian territorial struggle which include several articles on the topic but also various interviews including two acquaintances, Alessandro Petti (from Decolonizing Architecture) and Yazid Anani (from Birzeit University near Ramallah). This website is also focusing on the Palestinian Right to Return and strategies on its application.
Its authors are : - Ahmad Barclay - Nina Kolowratnik - Tashy Endres
In April 2010, David Harvey gave a lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London) about his Marxist reading of Capitalism's contradiction that inevitably led to the current economical crisis. In the following video, his speech is being illustrated by a great series of drawings by RSA Animate. The result is a vivid and concise discourse that needs to be absolutely watched !
I am a bit late with these news but I learned yesterday that Ai Wei Wei has been placed under house arrest by the Chinese Authorities at the beginning of this month. In fact, one could recently read about his studio in Shanghai, first authorized then built, and eventually retroactively judged illegal and subject to destruction; following what, the Chinese artist decided to organize himself a destructive celebration of his studio. This seems to have been as an excuse for the Chinese Authorities to arrest him -they were probably planning that a long time ago, since Ai Wei Wei never failed to criticize the Chinese governmental system- as "they cannot let anything happen if they don't understand it" says the artist in a interview for the BBC visible here.
I definitely do not register myself in a world vision dividing the "free democratic world" and the "evil totalitarianism axis"; however, one has to observe that the freedom of press and opinion in China is still severely limited since those liberties constitutes an obstacle to the bureaucratic capitalist system currently in operation. The difficulty of dealing with those issues seems to be related to the fact that governmentability is more operative via a system than via peoples themselves, as illustrated by Wen Jiabao's (the Chinese Prime Minister) own interview for CNN being censored in China. In fact, in this interview Jiabao was stating that "freedom of speech is indispensable, for any country, a country in the course of development and a country that has become strong". Read the whole interview.
Here is another text I originally wrote for my post-professional thesis...
So far, I have been focusing exclusively on the militaro-political aspect of the problem I propose to study in this essay. However, it would be deceiving not to evoke the economical system this first aspect attempts to protect: in the Western world, namely Capitalism. In fact, Capitalism as well necessities a space, and architecture, more or less consciously is ready to provide it. This chapter will be divided into three parts which will attempt to explore the process of gentrification and the two paradigmatic examples of capitalist architecture that are the privately owned public spaces and the shopping malls.
Gentrification is a process extremely illustrative of how Capitalism operates. In fact, only a part of the capitalist system is based on the more or less objective value of manpower and raw materials. A very important other part is provided only by values that are based exclusively on the virtual. That is how a low social class’ neighborhood that despite a not so comfortable aspect, provides a relatively cheap place to live in the center of a city, can be transformed into the new area where the wealthy youth has to spend their nights. This process usually starts without any transcendental will, with a little amount of middle class young people who decide to move to this kind of districts in order to benefit of the low rents and the authenticity of the neighborhood. Politics, speculators and developers do not need a lot of time before becoming aware of the potential of such area in the center of the city. For the first ones, it constitutes a good opportunity to get rid of a population that is considered as risky and marginal; for the second and third ones, it is a very good way to develop a good financial investment. When politics are taking measure to transform this “dangerous neighborhood where nobody want to come out at night” into a “better and safer place” –understand a place that the authorities can fully control-, speculators buy the current buildings, increase considerably the rent from years to years until the tenants cannot pay anymore and eventually replace them with a population can pay or even destroy the concerned buildings. The developers can then intervene and build new complexes of commercial activities and condominiums. Gentrification sometimes necessities a dozen of years to become actually effective; however it often implement itself in a much faster way, such as in Williamsburg in Brooklyn where it only took six years to transform a low social class black area into one of the main hipster place of New York City.
Capitalism does not stand not to be in full control of every space of the city. It does not bear either that its best architectural invention, the skyscraper that virtually reproduces infinitely a parcel of land for only once its price, could be limited by urban codes. That is how, in 1961, the City of New York made a deal with private entities in order to reform those codes. In exchange of a significant area of public space on their parcel, corporations and private owners would be authorized to build their towers higher. However, this little zone of public space was not meant to be given to the city so those private actors remained the owners and controllers of this area. They therefore keep the right to authorize or forbid activities to occur and persons to pass on those spaces. Under an appearance of openness, privately owned public spaces are in fact extremely selective of their public. Employees working in the towers are of course welcome; those open spaces are part of a post-modern biopolitical capitalism that appears as taking good care of its subjects. People who spend money on those sites in order to buy coffee, hot dogs, or newspapers are also targeted for this type of public spaces. Others are regarded as unwelcomed and even suspect and can even be asked to leave in case of a “subversive” activity such as playing with a ball, taking pictures or picnicking. Both corporations and governments are satisfied with those public spaces. Corporations are able to build higher their skyscrapers, provide open space for their employees, developing commercial activities while governments see their public space being maintained by private actors and any potential space of gathering being controlled and supervised.
Shopping malls are another typology of private spaces open to the public under determined circumstances. Once again, two birds are being killed with one stone: the paradigm of the Greek Agora as public space is replaced by a hyper-controlled space owned by private corporations AND this space is able to be highly productive in consumption. First shopping malls in their contemporary version are said to have been invented by the Austrian-American Victor Gruen in the mid 50’s. In fact, he is probably the one to have thought of those pure capitalist architectures as pieces of urbanism. In an America that was tremendously starting to move its middle class –to whom shopping mall are addressed- in large spread out suburbia, shopping malls were going to become the equivalent of Europeans old cities’ centers, a pedestrian place of gathering and activity. However, probably observing that those European public spaces had been the same spaces that hosted the various national revolutions and insurrections, the United States placed this new kind of public space within the frame of a private supervision, control and police. As Mike Davis describes it for Los Angeles: “The ‘public spaces’ of the new megastructures and supermalls have supplanted traditional streets and disciplined their spontaneity. Inside malls, office centers and cultural complexes, public activities are sorted into strictly functional comportments under the gaze of private police forces.” By designing this space as an interior area accessible by definite entrances and supervised by dozen of video cameras and sensors, corporations were assured to limit to the minimum the population that was not welcomed on “their public space”. The design is also oriented in order to compose a whole interior fantastic world of itself that is supposed to be perceived as better than the reality. This world is safe, clean, warm, entertaining and attractive and it is always a disappointment to leave it for the consumer who forgot reality thanks to it.
The main characteristic of capitalist design is to leave nothing to chance. Indeed chance provokes uncertainty and uncertainty provides an illegibility that can be unproductive for Capitalism. Supermarkets’ products are placed on their shelves according to various consumers surveys and marketing studies; malls are designed in such a way that in order to reach the place their consumers intended to visit, they would have see the integrality of the shops in presence; hyper-visibility discourage homeless people, kids and political activists to take place on private piazzas etc. Legibility is the ability of Capitalism to transform space into an object, both marketable and controllable.
Almost as a sequel of the article I wrote about the notion of Urbicide, here is a invitation to read Andrew Herscher's essay, Violence Taking Place. The architecture of the Kosovo conflict which attempts to illustrate the role of architecture destruction in the second conflict of the Balkans in the 90's (the first one being the Bosnia war). In fact, destructing buildings in an asymmetrical conflict is not anymore a strategy of diminution of the enemy's forces but rather a symbolic negation of the otherness' culture and to a broader scale, the otherness' existence. Herscher thus recounts the three phases of the Kosovo conflict which all dramatized this perspective on architecture assassination. The first one (1st and 2nd images) is the 1998 series of attacks, massacres and profanation from (Christians) Serbians towards (Muslims) Albanians in Kosovo. The second one was the surgical bombing of Belgrade by NATO (3rd image) targeting not only political objectives but also civilian infrastructures like bridges or the TV Tower. Eventually the third one occurred after the partial retreat of Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian troops from Kosovo and the non official Kosovo Liberation Army's retaliation of destruction (4th image) on Christian churches... Herscher finishes his essay with the description of a billboard (5th image) encouraging the new independent country of Kosovo (still not recognized by Serbia) to preserve the common architectural patrimony of the country as being fully part of the National narrative.
Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, the two founders of Decolonizing Architecture (with Eyal Weizman) will be presenting their work at Columbia University on November 10th (at 6:30pm). Their lecture entitled Profaning Colonial Architecture will introduce their strategy of re-using abandoned Israeli settlements in the West Bank for the future new state of Palestine. Their projects are therefore based on a pretty optimistic scenario (Israel leaving the West Bank (1) without destroying their own settlements as they did in Gaza (2)) but as said in a BBC article that a reader just sent to me, the colonization's impact on land is such that it can now be considered almost as irreversible which make Decolonizing Architecture's projects even more important.
Archinect just released an article about a very ironic project which proposes to build a "terrorist motel" instead of the controversial Muslim Cultural Center in Down Town New York. Mocking the idea of associating Muslims with terrorists and acknowledging the fact that the West always needs enemies in order to sustain itself, Stealth Architects proposes to provide terrorists directly on the U.S. ground thus authorizing an organize a local hunt rather than expensive abroad wars in Afghanistan. This project is also a small ode to the act of excavating by creating construction documents that indicate the process of digging in order to achieve this negative labyrinth.
Philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek and filmmaker Udi Aloni were invited yesterday in New York (peculiarly enough, hosted by St Paul's Church in Manhattan which seems to have an interesting priest) by the famous Jenin Freedom Theater (located in Jenin's refugee camp in the West Bank) in order to expose their thought about the current Palestinian situation. It would be hard for me to make a coherent summary of those three talks and I am unfortunately lacking of time to do so; however I wanted to report several points which were evoked yesterday:
ALAIN BADIOU: - The Palestinian weakness is and has to be an affirmation of existence - Under the name of Palestinian lies something universal - Palestinians are being presented but not represented
UDI ALONI (who wanted to talk as an "Israeli Jew"): - It is very important to distinguish which art if the official art and which one is the resistive one. Films like Waltz with Bashir or Lebanon are the official art. - The difference between Tel Aviv's population and Jerusalem's population is that Tel Aviv's is racist but think it is liberal whereas Jerusalem's know it is racist and acts like it.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: - Colonization does not really happen between "what is happening" (in reference of what interests Western medias). Colonization is a slow and invisible process enforced by a Kafkaesque bureaucracy system - Joke: "In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: 'Let's establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it's true; if it's written in red ink, it's false.' After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: 'Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair -- the only thing you can't get is red ink." That is our role to be the red ink. - Israeli liberals want "decaffeinated Palestinians" (in reference of his observation on nowadays' society who wants coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, cream without fat, warfare without casualty, sex without sex etc.) - Western Countries (especially in Europe currently) are acting for a "reasonable racism", a "barbarism with human face", a racial oppression that does not kill. - "Antigone is a true bitch". He advices the Jenin Freedom Theater which wants to play Antigone to change the script during the fight between Antigone and Creon by an exasperation of the people of Thebes who proclaim a revolution and kills both of them (!).
I know that it is sometimes risky or irrelevant to extract those quotes from their context (each ot their talks last for thirty minutes), but I thought it was worth it to have a bit of the substance of what have been said.
I just watched a television debate on the French television (thanks Maxime !) wondering if the current circumstances were allowing to think of a potential peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This enunciation of the problem mimic the one which has been the topic of the very recent negotiations between Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas in Washington. Even Abbas himself posed the problem as such: "Israel has to choose between peace or the colonization".
HOWEVER, this enunciation is, in my opinion, symptomatic of the absolute refusal of the World to see what is the real situation in Palestine. Talking about peace implies that there is a war going on which is not the case by any mean. I affirm it; there is no war in Palestine.
Frederic Taddeï, the animator of this debate killed the latter "in utero", when his first question to his six guests the following question: "Who is to be blamed ?" This very question implies a symmetrical conflict characterized by a mutual violence between each camps, in other words, a war. The situation in Palestine is highly different and whoever went there without a preliminary educational brainwashed knows it.
In fact when Mahmoud Abbas proposes to the Israelis to choose between colonization and peace, he knows that he is bluffing at poker with no game whatsoever and his adversary knowing it. Only the Israeli State or the International Community can enforce the application of International Law which would stop the systematic daily oppression of the Palestinian people. I am sorry to repeat what I already wrote in numerous previous articles but one has to know that there are at least 300 000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank that are violating the article 49 of the Geneva Convention -I am not even talking about the violent acts of some settlers on the local population- and that is one aspect of the illegal status of Israel. One other is the various humiliations of Palestinian by Israeli soldiers revealing the extreme power established between a population and an army which is composed by a tremendous amount of people who are less than 22 years old. Tzahal is claiming that those cases of humiliation -those which are carried to the public- are marginal and not revealing the professional spirit of the army and I have to recognize that I understand some of those situations of "nervous breakdown" as symptomatic of the pressure put on those kids' shoulders associated with an educational brainwash (that is part of the Israeli military service's package). However and despite the fact that I condemn those acts, I also recognize the same "attenuating circumstances" to the very marginal terrorist acts committed by some disoriented Palestinians.
Nowadays, the only valid argument that can be carried by the Israelis for those violation of Law is religious. In fact, only the argument according to which God's words are the most important and that the antic territory of Israel belongs to the Jewish People. There is nothing I could argue against a Jewish fundamentalist who would affirm that a human life and human law is nothing compared to God. The defenders of Israel's occupation should thus decide if they agree with such a extremist and violent argument or not because once again, that is the only one which functions in a system of rationality that do not contain any contradiction. Nowadays, nobody can both include Human Rights in his system of rationality and defend Israel's colonization and occupation in the West Bank as this territory was defined in 1949 by the Green Line.
In conclusion, I would like to say that I am profoundly revolted against the eternal highjack of intelligence that is effectuated in debates which constantly refuse to look at the reality as it is, and the elaboration of semantic decoys in order to hide the undeniable violations of the International Law.
Following is the programme of an upcoming event I really invite you to join !
I'll be around for an installation, and I'll try to do a report for the unlucky ones that won't be able to come. See you there!
Daniel Fernandez Pascual recently published on Deconcrete an article as short as interesting about New Orleans' "shotguns houses". In fact, those houses have been shaped by the fact that tax applied on the frontage; by adopting the narrowest form as possible, those houses' owners were paying less taxes. The second reason for such a name "shotgun" is explained by Candy Changas a house typology that would allow to shoot a shotgun straight through from the porch to the backyard ! Both D.F. Pascual and C. Chang then evoked a similarity with the land ownership along the Mississippi (see the beautiful map below) reduced to its minimum as frontage, just wide enough to be able to load ships.
While walking on Ramallah's hills (near Beituniya), I once catch sight of peculiar buildings on further away hills. Those buildings are actually concrete structures which have been part of an interrupted construction between the two Palestinian villages of Ein Kinya and Mazra'a al-Qibliya and close from the Israeli settlement Talmon (that you can see on my second photograph). According to my source (thanks Dror !), it was very likely Palestinian constructions that have been stopped by the Israeli when the second Intifada (2000) started. If it is the case those abandoned structures are an architectural instant, symbol of the Israeli control over Palestinian lives. I even found another picture of them from another point of view (see the last photograph). If anybody has some more, I would be very interested to see and publish them.
What I call Palestinian Archipelago is the group of "islands" within the West Bank in which since the Oslo Accords (1993) Palestinian have security and civil control (Zone A) and security control joint with the Israelis (Zone B). The rest of the area in the West Bank (Zone C) is completely under Israeli control and composes the "Mare Magnum" all around those islands. I thus worked on a map that would expresses this maritime vision of Palestine. Feel free to click on it, the resolution is pretty high.
PS: Thanks to a reader's comment, I now know that somebody (Julien Bousac) already got this ready and made a clearer map out of it.
picture: Gaza after the 2008 Israeli Siege. Getty Images
Here is a small text I recently wrote about the notion of urbicide. It includes a digest of Eyal Weizman's lecture about Forrensic Architecture I had the chance to attend both in New York and in Bethlehem.
Despite of the fact that this strategy has been always occurring in history, the notion of urbicide has been invented by the former Mayor of Belgrade, Bogdan Bogdanovic after the wars of Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1996. One could define it as the act of destroying buildings and cities that do not constitute any military targets. Urbicide is rather an act that is supposed to affect the very life of the population in such a way that war cannot be ignored by anybody.
This technique is being used in symmetrical wars like the Second World War and the Blitz in England on the one hand and the systematic bombing of German cities by the allies on the other hand. However, urbicide is also fully present in asymmetrical wars with the case of guerilla AND governmental terrorism. The most famous example in the Western World is of course the terrorist attacks against New York’s World Trade Center in 2001 for its sudden and unexpected violence that was both perceived literally and symbolically; however, governmental armies also use this strategy to actively oppress a given population. That was thus the case of the Serbian army over the Bosnian population during the same wars evoked above, and that also constitutes the daily life of the Palestinian population who has to suffer from the Israel Defense Forces’ domination. One should not forget that buildings and cities are the most tangible element of a civilization since even the written heritage that composes a nation’s archive necessities an architectural container. It thus happened that a civilization fully disappeared from History after having suffered from a combined genocide and urbicide.
In fact, urbicide has been pretty much developed as long as war exists. However, one can probably affirm that its surgical application and its insertion within a global warfare strategy of a highly sophisticated army are merely recent. Its implementation by the Israeli Defense Forces, for example, is very illustrative. We already saw in the last chapter how the Israeli soldiers were sometimes destroying Palestinian homes in order to re-compose the battle field, but there are plenty of other applications of urbicide in this context. The way Arab’s villages in Israel have been fully destroyed after 1949 is highly symptomatic of this refusal from the Israeli authorities to deny the Palestinian existence in the past, in the present and of course in the future. Nevertheless, this last example remains absolutely legal from Israel who is free to develop its own land as it wishes. On the contrary, the systematic destruction of civilian Palestinian buildings and homes in the Gaza strip can be absolutely considered as a war crime according to the International Law of conflicts. In that matter, Eyal Weizman observes the birth of a new legal discipline which places buildings as the main object of the judicial investigation. Weizman is then interested in the notion of “forensic architecture” that see war and building experts intervening in order to attempt to determine the technical means of destruction of architecture by external agents. In this regard, he focuses his study on the person of Marc Garlasco. Garlasco was one of the Pentagon experts in “attacks design” and during the beginning of the second Gulf War in 2003, he was named “Chief of High Value Targeting”. His task consisted in the organization –Weizman uses the word ‘design’ in order to accentuate the architectural aspect of the job- of various attacks of buildings in order to assassinate several members of the Hussein administration or family. The fact that Garlasco was allowed to include the death of up to twenty nine civilians in each attacks is illustrative of the way Western armies are dealing with both military pragmatism and political communication. Just as much as there are processes and software of positive design of architecture, it also exists some for the accomplishment of a negative architecture; an architecture that has been transformed by the mean of destruction. The study of this transformation is far more objective than the chaotic aspect of such an architecture could let suppose. That is how, from his job in the Pentagon, Garlasco ended up working for the organization Human Rights Watch as an expert of what Weizman now calls forensic architecture. Before being fired by this same organization for the collection he owned of military Nazi objects, Garlasco studied the evidences of the 2008 Gaza siege. His conclusions proving that war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed by the Israeli Army during this operation, were then confirmed by the United Nations’ representative, Richard Goldstone in his report.
Urbicide had thus become a scientific surgical military operation on architecture that allow to either simply kills a civilian population by the mean of architecture, or practically and symbolically destroys the organizational and cultural aspects of the city in a biopolitical attack on a population.
Ma'ale Adummim is an illegal Israeli settlement near the Palestinian town of Abu Dis (in the East Jerusalem's region). It is one of the largest settlement of the West Bank and hosts around 34000 settlers. The settlement like a lot of others is situated on the top of a hill in order to gain geographical and topographical advantages against the Palestinians.
Hebron is a city in the Southern part of the West Bank. Its particularity is that Israeli settlers are both living around the city but also WITHIN the old city center. For example the market street (see pictures above and below) is surmounted by settlers who do not hesitate to throw rubbish or even acid and molotov cocktails on the Palestinian population underneath. Most commercial activities have been shut down by the Israeli soldiers and a whole part of the old city (including the Khalil Al-Rahman Mosque which is extremely important for the Muslims) is controlled directly by the Israeli Defense Forces. Around the city, Israeli settlements are situated very close from the road and Palestinian villages. Even settlers' agricultural fields are fenced and surveyed by observation towers...
Arena of Speculation (Critical conjecture on the spatial futures of Israel-Palestine) is a remarkable platform about the Palestinian territorial struggle which include several articles on the topic but also various interviews including two acquaintances, Alessandro Petti (from Decolonizing Architecture) and Yazid Anani (from Birzeit University near Ramallah).
