Hollow Land

Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, Eyal Weizman, Verso, 2007

Considering the way the Gaza strip was evacuated by Israeli forces in September 2005 and the outcomes of this evacuation, the author retraces different strategies that, through architecture and urbanism, aimed at either “soothing”/“solving” the dimension of conflict and division between the refugee population and the state of Israel.

see:

-articles and research on American evangelicalism and Zionism as a colonial undertaking / and contemporary collusions

-Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped being a Jew, London, Verso, 2014

-Elias Sanbar, La Palestine expliquée à tout le monde, Le Seuil, 2013

-The Indians of Palestine: An interview between Gilles Deleuze and Elias Sanbar

These strategies were designed by either the state of Israel, its politic or military administrations, or by external international actors such as organisms from the UN, US or EU. They met a variety of responses, described in the text, from either constituted bodies such as the Palestinian Authority, or individual and personal reception from families of refugees or private investors amongst others.

Can architecture, as it constitutes a tool of power, coercion and management of population and territory, be re-appropriated?

In a postcolonial moment, is an urban tabula rasa necessary to re-appropriate one’s own territory and one’s national/cultural identity. Examples in the text of re-naming of places: language is a similar tool to architecture, shaping, mastering, domesticating the world, the environment and people.

see again here: Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped being a Jew, London, Verso, 2014

Following the assessments brought up by the article, we realise that the conflict does not only exist between the state of Israel and the Palestinian population, but also between binary answers given by partisan institutions and the personal ways and solutions found within the population to inhabit a territory and an architecture.

Can we use given architecture in subversive manners? Can dwelling be enough ?

see: Heidegger, Building, dwelling, thinking

What does the notion of autonomy mean to you?

Can one ever be “autonomous” from the past: the remains of colonial architecture function as models of organisation and administration. Architecture is a trace, a memory. Can it be subverted?

To knock down the traces from a violent past does not get rid of it but erases a necessary tool for memory, a tool to confront that past and to move forward. It may be that architecture can never be actually decolonised but architecture can constitute a tool to keep on decolonising actively, as a proof, a witness, a memory. A tabula rasa can lead to a form a negation of the past, but the question of the nature and function of this remaining architecture is problematic: does it become national monument, does it become private spaces, public facilities etc.

Autonomy from State administration or national authority: is inhabiting, dwelling something that can, should, be delegated to an external institution of power? Is it something that can be ruled, regulated? When does dwelling become resistance from an authority?

see Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension, 1966

Colonial States considered to be indebted to former colonies (ex. the UK and Palestine, or India etc.) deal with the debt or so-called help on a purely administrative level, the ways and manners of the “postcolonial” population, the personal lives, are never taken into account. However these lives remain passive to the policies, strategies, and are totally dependent and restrained by the administrative dealings.

see on questions of integration / assimilation in former colonial States:

Podcast France culture, Le multiculturalisme a sombré dans la Tamise, 16/08/2018

Only through an organic re-appropriation, and individuals’ ways and manners of living can architecture be decolonised. Decolonisation cannot be bureaucratic.

Is to decolonise architecture a negation of settlement? (settlement > property, domestication, capitalism, etc.)

The undertaking of “de-camping” refugees by the Israeli administration is a way to control and assimilate a population through a movement of embourgeoisement, to integrate within the capitalist structure a population that is embracing a temporal guerrilla to keep on being unsettle and therefore uncontrollable.

“Permanent revolution” and “endless present” are hints to a nomadic sense of being as a resistance to a capitalist, coercitive management of lives, people, territory. A temporal guerrilla against a spatialised power.

In relation to questions of ecology and the anthropocene we could say that architecture has been a tool for humanity to rule, domesticate, transform, and consume nature, and the earth as a territory.

• the re-appropriation of human structures and architecture by nature / other species : is it a form of decolonisation?
• how to question the very nature of our settled way of life as a colonisation?
• is nomadism an actual relevant answer or a new form of ultra liberal consumption?
• how will climate change change the way we inhabit and are settling?