“The Architecture of Violence” featuring Eyal Weizman, Al Jazeera English.

This mini-doc is part of the Al Jazeera series ‘Rebel Architecture’, a documentary series that profiles “architects who are using design as a form of activism and resistance to tackle the world’s urban, environmental and social crises” (“Rebel Architecture”).

This episode features Eyal Weizman, a renowned scholar and architect, and founder of Forensic Architecture, a transdisciplinary research agency which presents spatial evidence of violence and necropolitical structures. In this documentary, Weizman details the way architecture is used as an agent of slow violence in the occupied territories of the Gaza strip.

Weizman describes how a narrative of Israeli dominance is sustained through architectural details. He explains how Israeli settlements are placed above Palestinian territories to create a lived sense of surveillance. He also describes how ornamental details are deployed within the Israeli settlements to create a sense of centrality and history. Weizman later zooms out, showing how violence is carried out on a larger, structural scale by illuminating the highways connecting Israeli settlements and the checkpoints that separate Palestinian territories. Breaking down these dominant architectural practices, Weizman tells us that

to control a space, you need to create differentiation in speed of movement; when you put Israeli colonies on highways you accelerate the movement through the space; in the same way, on every twist and turn of the terrain Palestinians would encounter a border, a checkpoint, a fence, a valley they cannot cross. (8:55-9:34)

Weizman further explores how the Gaza strip retains architectural evidence of violence, such as crumbling walls and holes knocked through the sides of houses, combining this spatial evidence with video footage to virtually recreate invasions by IDF soldiers. This practice is part of his larger project of ‘Forensic Architecture,’ which has relevance today in understanding event timelines of violence in ongoing genocides.

This video is interesting for the purview of Perpetrator Studies, as it gives visual aid for understanding how slow violence is carried out in Israel and Palestine. It also introduces projects by Weizman’s research initiative Forensic Architecture, which offers new and illuminating ways to study perpetration by looking at architecture as spatial evidence of violence.  This video, then, is interesting for teaching about the role of objects in testimony and memory, as well as the testimonial capabilities of the posthuman or the more-than-human.

Author of this entry: Flora Lehmann.

• “The Architecture of Violence” featuring Eyal Weizman, Youtube. Al Jazeera English. 2 September 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybwJaCeeA9o