Nottingham talk: The Architecture of Occupation in Israel/Palestine

Today’s talk in Nottingham (dated Monday Dec 3 but presumably today, Dec 1).

This talk continues the theme of the “Impossible Prison” but is not apparently directly about Foucault.

The Architecture of Occupation in Israel/Palestine
Eyal Weizman

BioCity Lecture Theatre
BioCity Nottingham
Pennyfoot Street
Nottingham
NG1 1GF

Weizman and Alessi are currently researching a masterplan that exposes the hidden intention of Israeli planners after the ending of occupation and the settlers’ evacuation. Here architecture appears to collude with oppression, while ghettoising both Israelis and Palestinians. “The landscape has become the battlefield on which power and state control confront both subversive and direct resistance,” Weizman writes in the introduction to his acclaimed book A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture. Planning and the built environment have become blatant political tools, the speakers argue, dominating and determining different life courses as effectively as Foucault’s “biopower.”

Eyal Weizman is Centre Director of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, London. Projects based on his human rights research in Israel/Palestine have been shown in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmo, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. He has organised and lectured at conferences worldwide. He is an author and regular contributor to many journals and magazines. In 2006, he won the James Sterling Memorial Lecture Prize.

Alessandro Petti is an architect and researcher in urban studies at the University Institute of Architecture of Venice, Italy. He is a member of Multiplicity: agency for territorial investigations based in Milan and he is the curator with Sandi Hilal of the research project and exhibition Stateless Nation (2004).

World AIDS Day

Today is World AIDS Day, established 20 years ago. To mark the occasion AIDES has created an advertising campaign called “Explore. Just Protect Yourself.”

AIDES is a community-based organization founded by Daniel Defert in 1984 after Foucault’s death.

The campaign is apparently directed at young people and encourages sexual exploration and is heavy on the sexual imagery, some of it a little dubious (more here).

The imagery is also a bit psychedelic and science fictional as you can see in the following YouTube clip.