In 2004, the Department of English and Comparative Studies inaugurated an annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture to honour a prominent literary scholar and a renowned public intellectual who died in 2003.
Said understood criticism to be a ‘humanistic activity’ encompassing ‘erudition and sympathy’, sensitivity to ‘inner tensions’, and an openness to imponderables and mysteries. His own finely-tuned responsiveness to the singularity of any piece of writing with which he engaged, is evident in his innovative and surprising interpretations of both canonical and marginalised literature.
These same writings also register the obligation felt by Said to make visible the actual affiliations that exist between ‘the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force on the other.’
The University of Warwick had twice hosted visits from Edward Said. In 1994 the Department of English together with the Department of Philosophy held an International Conference on his work and the work this has generated. Papers presented at this conference were later published as Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson, Benita Parry and Judith Squires (1997). In 2001 Said received an Honorary Degree. On both occasions his crowded lectures revealed his singular ability to bring politics to scholarship and scholarship to politics.

The 6th Annual Edward Said Memorial Lecture
Tuesday 2nd March 2010 at 6pm, University of Warwick, Ramphal Building, Room R0.21 
“Spatial Politics in Israel and Palestine”
Professor Eyal Weizman, Director of the Centre for Research in Architecture, Goldsmiths College, London.
Author of Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007)
Further enquiries to: N.Lazarus@warwick.ac.uk

Bethlehem-based architectural practice Decolonizing Architecture members Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman present some of the ideas that inform their work in conversation with researcher Lorenzo Pezzani, Abdoumaliq Simone, urbanist and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College and film curator Rasha Salti.
This event runs concurrently with the ‘Decolonizing Architecture’ film season at The Delfina Foundation curated by Rasha Salti.
Supported by The Delfina Foundation

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£12 (£10 concessions), booking recommended
For tickets, call 020 7887 8888

The Human Rights Project (HRP) enables students to learn about, and engage in, the contemporary human rights movement. The Project focuses on the philosophical foundations and political mechanisms of human rights and maintains a special interest in freedom of expression, the public sphere, and media. Since 2001 HRP has supported dozens of student internships at human rights and humanitarian organizations, governmental and international agencies, local community groups, hospitals and clinics, and research centers from Peshawar to Albany. HRP is directed by Thomas Keenan  

http://hrp.bard.edu/project/programs/

Posted: 23.02.2010

Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art is proud to present the fifth season of the Urban Field Speakers Series. Toronto, Ontario

Alessandro Petti

Sara Graham, moderator
March 11, 2010 at 7:30 PM


The artist, architect and professor at Bard / Al-Quds University speaks about Decolonzing Architecture, a collaborative research project that explores the problems and potentiality associated with the reuse of Israeli colonial architecture after Israeli occupation and settlers’ evacuations. Moderated by visual artist Sara Graham.

more info

Posted: 06.02.2010

Nahr el Bared Reconstruction for Civil Action and Studies (NBRC) would like to recruit one Urban Designer and two Architects to work on the production of the masterplan in the adjacent area.
NBRC is located in Tripoli/Nahr el Bared.

Please circulate the TOR for these positions:
1 Urban designer (2-5 years experience)
1 Architect (min 1 year experience)
1 Architect (3-5 years experience)

NBRC is a local Nahr el bared grassroot initiative that worked on the production of the masterplan of the nahr el bared camp and is currently working on a masterplan for the Nahr el bared Camp adjacent Areas. It focuses on advocating for the reconstruction of the destroyed camp and preparation of various studies to facilitate that process.
It was initiated in late June 2007.

» Read the rest of the entry

Posted: 31.01.2010

Top Ten by Tirdad Zolghadr

I’m a little tired of interdisciplinarity à la “exhibition research,” where we play semi-Foucauldian journalist or quasi-Rancièrian ethnographer with boring impunity. But decolonizing.ps shows it’s still possible to cross disciplines and act like adults. With a subtle sense of site and medium, format and form, Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, and Eyal Weizman use architecture to articulate possibilities of decolonization: “Recognizing that Israeli colonies and military bases are amongst the most excruciating instruments of domination, the project assumes that a viable approach to the issue of their appropriation is to be found [in] inaugurating an ‘arena of speculation’ that incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives.” Said “arena” includes landscape designs for interrupting the colonial apparatus, proposals that strive to be both pragmatic and militant, inventive and long-term.

http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201001&id=24455

Posted: 28.01.2010

The Delfina Foundation and Decolonizing.ps are collaborating on a residency in Bethlehem, at the Decolonizing Architecture studio. This residency is an opportunity for practitioners to gain intensive experience in practice lead research and spatial activism, within the conceptual frame of the studio, in one the world’s most charged conflict areas.

Lorenzo Pezzani is the first practitioner to take part in this pilot project. A PhD candidate at Goldsmiths University’s Centre for Research Architecture, Lorenzo Pezzani’s practice-based research looks at how the afterlife of various buildings, monuments, migrant bodies and images can enhance, through profanation, the production of a new postcolonial ecology.

The Delfina Foundation facilitates artistic exchanges and dialogue between the UK and the Middle East & North Africa via a programme of artistic residencies and related public events. Its public programme (including talks & exhibitions) provides platforms for artists to explore common areas of practice, showcase their work and look at the link between the arts and civic society.

More information about The Delfina Foundation.

Posted: 25.01.2010

Posted: 20.01.2010

The Book of Return assembled by Alessandra Gola (decolonizing.ps) for Zochorot it is simultaneously an archive of aural and drawn testimonies about the Palestinian towns and villages destroyed in 1948, and a collection of ideas for an effective return of Palestinian refugees. More importantly it is a tool around which discussions about different forms of returns can take place. The aim is to add to the legalistic approach to the right of return a projective one which proposes a series of images, aiming to open the imagination towards different forms in which an actual return could take place. We believe that a combination of a legal and an architectural approach are necessary in order to open the political imagination.

The book of Returns is a nomadic device, moving through the different sites and locations where refugees are dispursed, mirroring their political extraterritoriality. In each context it is performing another function. Including maps, drawings, photographs, texts, analysis and actual projects is a fundamental tool to kick start discussions, raise questions, and work around profound fears. Size, material and color are the structural parts for the case. The size plays the role in inviting stake holders to gather around this monumental book. The information collected within the book are intentionaly raw, direct and somehow undetermined, in order to be used as trigers for discussions.

Posted: 10.01.2010

Building on the established intellectual networks and projects of Decolonizing Architecture, CAMP the Center for Architecture Media and Politics is an international collective of architects, scholars, artists, urban planners and theorists committed to research, teaching, and cultural programming that generate new thinking about the role of architecture, media, and the politics of space in zones of conflict. The center aims to combine this research with an equal commitment to teaching, an aim it is pursuing through affiliation with the Al-Quds Bard Honors College for Liberal Arts and Sciences in Abu Dis. C A M P wants to rethink the relationship between research and teaching, to establish innovative programs of study that structure learning in ways that involve students more substantively in research. On this front, C A M P will begin by establishing a summer school that expands the student residency program already in place at Decolonizing Architecture. The inaugural C A M P conference “Architecture, Pedagogy & the Politics of Spatial Knowledge” (12-13 January, 2010) is meant to give preliminary shape to the center and to better define these core objectives: collective research, teaching, curricular development, and cultural programming.

camp_program.pdf

campmission.pdf

Posted: 21.11.2009

Intervista di Guido Piccoli a Alessandro Petti per la Radiotelevisione svizzera

Posted: 04.11.2009

In the occasion of De-placing future memory workshop, 24 – 25 September 2009, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, UK
Dan Rycroft and Paul Young respond to The future archeology of Israel’s colonization

Posted: 20.10.2009

The photographer Francesco Mattuzzi, artist in residency of DA 2007, sent some beautiful pictures from Istanbul. For their publication in high resolution please contact info@francescomattuzzi.com

Posted: 5.10.2009

24 September 2009 - 10 January 2010

There is a two directional movement embodied in the concept of refugee. The first trajectory is a literal “line of flight” that carries the refugee away from her home and into the “danger and safety” of exile. The other, in opposite direction but in direct relation to the first, is that of return. The first is an incessant process of transformation and the second is the practice of political desire. But return cannot be understood as suspended politics, rather as politics endlessly practiced at present: through the form of architecture that seeks to communicate temporariness, and through cultural, political, social and military organizations and mobilization. Furthermore, the practices of return are articulated in relation to two places at once — the place of refuge and the site of origins – and both are thus fundamentally spatial practices that often mirror each other. When return becomes possible, the site of origins is already irrevocably transformed. Although displacement has often been from the rural, a return will always to the urban. It is never a simple turning back of time, a return is always a return to the already built.

Our work on the appropriation of settlements and military bases to be evacuated –the “future archaeology” of Israel’s occupation — may articulate a certain laboratory of returns. Recently, this study was expanded to include other instances of displacement such as the afterlife of Italian colonial architecture in Libya — one of the least known but most radical laboratories of architectural modernism. This allows us to expand on the arsenal of the various architectural practices of transformation, always both mirroring and subverting the architecture of built. The revisiting, re-occupation, and appropriation of the already built is thus the urgent task of architecture. A commission by Miske village descendants, to think through spatial strategies for ‘present return’ has lead to an approach that simultaneously involves dealing with the space of displacement (Palestine refugee camps across the Near East) and the place of origins (the fields that are today’s remnants of original villages): A stereoscopic planning - every material intervention in one site has affects across borders in another.

Returns a project by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, Eyal Weizman

Architects and artists in residence: Elodie Doukhan, Marco Cerati, Beatrice Catanzaro, Maria Vittoria Mastella, Vera Schmidt, Rachela Abbate, Silvia Columbo, Chloe Athanasopoulou

www.iabr.nl

Posted: 15.09.2009

11th international Istanbul Biennial September 12 - November 8, 2009

In an abandon Greek School, in occasion of the Istanbul Biennial, Decolonizing Architecture inaugurates a lecture for absentee students entitled How to re-inhabit your enemy’s house?

Books of Spatial Profanation. 5 folios: Migrations, Returns, Profanation, Confrontation, Proximity
Gaza 2005: Single channel video, Nadav Harel and Roberto Sartor

diego segatto’s Gallery

Istanbul Biennial

Posted: 04.09.2009

Comparing Palestinian and Israeli practices and constructs of separation
during the post Intifada (2005-2009)

Cédric Parizot, Centre de Recherche Français de Jérusalem

This presentation studies interactions between Israelis and Palestinians within places where they still cross each other trajectories during the post Intifada period (2005-2009).Two types of places have been chosen: on the one hand, bypass roads and check points, where Palestinians and Israelis cross each other without meeting and, on the other hand, streets of West Jerusalem were local Jewish Israeli residents regularly interact with West Bank Palestinian workers. The aim is to understand how the constructs of the interactions and spaces can produce at the same time blindness and hypersensitivities: while Israelis hardly notice Palestinians in these places, conversely, Palestinians feel a reinforcement of Israeli presence and occupation. In all, I’ll try to show to what extent, these ordinary interactions and the actors who participate in them play a central role in the production of sense of distinctiveness, discontinuity and separation between Israeli and Palestinian populations and spaces, despite the level of their remaining interactions and the intricateness of their geographic realm. Drawing on this study, I would apprehend separation as a mechanism of power whose functioning involves diffused and heterogeneous forms of power. Moreover, based on this research, I would like to reconsider the multiple dimensions of separation that have been underscored in Eyal Weizman theory of “Politics of verticality”, as well as to deepen the approach of the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a conflict focused on the management of space uses and constructs as Ariel Handel has suggested it.

1000 THOUGHTS 1 BETHLEHEM NIGHT
A series of informal meetings designed to open up a space for the exchange of thoughts and project developments

4 September 2009, 08.30 pm
location: Beit Sahour, Suk Ishab Madrasa Al Chatolic Street
Daar Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti

Posted: 18.08.2009

A short cut to know more about the project. Take a look

Posted: 03.08.2009

Talk by Sari Hanafi, professor at the American University in Beirut in conversation with Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London

The return of refugees to their country of origin is not only a subject of the right of return but of the rites of return. This return, seen as a ‘natural’ and thus ‘problem free’ process, is one of the major misleading myths surrounding the process of repatriation in the imaginaries of many refugees and Palestinian politicians. This can be apprehended only by placing it in the broader context of movement across or around borders by Palestinians. For instance, networks and relationships with other people as social capital are as important as a nostalgic sense of place in understanding voluntary migration, forced migration, and return migration.
By drawing on insights from various disciplinary approaches to borders, boundaries, and social networks, one can analyze the manifold implications of some socio-economic and cultural factors for an eventual Palestinian return migration and/or their movements inside/outside the region. Boundaries are symbolic, cultural, and social, constituting a cognitive or mental geography which influences the transnational ties between different Palestinian communities and shapes their identities. By the same token, the impermeability of some borders has constructed and reinvented new boundaries of difference and distinctiveness among these communities. First, displacement and separation of refugees from the place of origin inevitably created new boundaries between them and those who remained. Second, the institutions and readjustments of geopolitical borders after 1948 and 1967 fostered the emergence of such boundaries. Finally, the crossing of borders separating refugees from their place of origin entails power relations and conflicts that reinforce boundaries between groups (Parizot, 2008). Some boundaries remain, some are invented, some are remembered: this is the burden of borders in this highly partitioned part of the world.This talk will address directly and indirectly the question of the consequences of the movement of Palestinian populations over the sixty-year period since the first exodus in 1948 and the different identities they have developed. There have been several waves of refugees caused by the expanding power of Israel, migrations of Palestinian wo/men and sometimes families in search of better economic circumstances in the Arab world and beyond, and movements of individuals across borders to profit from the differences between the two sides of a border. With all this, there is a yearning to return to the point of departure.
Drawn on material collected over 14 years, through unstructured interviews with different categories of Palestinians living in the Palestinian Territory and in the diaspora, the objective of this article is to discuss the interplay between three key factors which impact the construction of “palestinian-ness” and will impact the process of return: geographical borders, social boundaries, and nation-state policies in the region. The study of the interplay between them will be used to depict: 1- the problematic relationship between the diaspora and the center (the Palestinian Territory) in the current/eventual return movement of Palestinian refugees and the absence of the diaspora as a social space; 2- the flexibility of transnational strategies adopted by the Palestinians, whether citizens, refugees, current returnees, or transmigrants; 3- the inflexibility of the policies of the nation-states in the region. The Palestinian National Authority (PNA), for example, seems to react negatively to the transnational practices of Palestinians rather than facilitate them, and this will have implications for the solution of the refugees problem. Indeed, the current nation-state model which is based on the “trinity” of nation-state-territory does not allow for a solution to the Palestinian refugees problem. A new model of nation-state must be conceptualized, based on flexible borders, flexible citizenship and some kind of separation between the nation and state, what I will call the extra-territorial nation-state. This model of nation-state is structural and marks a intermediary model between a territorially-based nation-state and a “de-territorialized” one. A rethinking of all traditional political/legal categories in the Middle East is necessary to resolve the problem of refugees in countries where they constitute sometimes one-third of the population. It is also important for tackling the question of the identity and the mobility of a whole population.

…followed by a series of questions of Irit Rogof, about the prefix ‘RE’ in all these projects; ‘Return’, ‘Recolonization’ and ‘Reconstruction’ - in the sense that it means anything but, an attempt to recouperate what was. So to some extent, if one is thinking in terms of a critical epistemology, the ‘RE’ is the recognition that one is starting from the middle, rather than from the beginning - that there is a set of circumstances that are there, as well as feelings and political allegiances, and one is making something in their wake, rather than creating some brand new set of circumstances. So maybe a mode of ‘reterritorialisation’ ?

     
_______________________________________________
1000 THOUGHTS 1 BETHLEHEM NIGHT -
A series of informal meetings designed to open up a space for the exchange of thoughts and project developments

Thursday 6 August 2009, 07.30 pm
location: Beit  Sahour, Suk Ishab Madrasa Al Chatolic Street 
Daar Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti
0598754572

www.decolonizing.ps
www.statelessnation.org
http://ramallahsyndrome.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________

Posted: 09.06.2009

D la repubblica della donne 648/2009

Posted: 23.04.2009

A+ N. 214/2008 [FRA] (pdf 1,4M)
A+ s’est entretenu avec le ‘decolonizingarchitect’ Alessandro Petti et le philosophe Lieven De Cauter, commissaire de l’exposition à Bozar

A+ N. 214/2008 [NL] (pdf 1,4M)
A+ sprak met ‘decolonizingarchitect’ Alesandro Petti en fi losoof Lieven De Cauter, curator van de tentoonstelling in Bozar

Posted: 22.04.2009

Roulotte 05/2009, Actar D Barcelona (pdf - 2,5 MB)

Posted: 09.04.2009

view video of the lecture

Posted: 30.03.2009

14 March – 26 April 2009

next
BARCELONA - 9 July – 5 September
ISTANBUL - 12 September – 8 Novemebr 2009
ROTTERDAM - 24 September 2009- 10 January 2010

Posted: 26.03.2009

On Saturday, the 28th of March, from 2 to 6 pm a part of 14.995 will be screened in the context of the Office of Real Time Activity, an experimental institution, which exists for the duration of the exhibition Friends of the Divided Mind, curated by 2nd year MA students in Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art in London.

14.995 is a project by ^^^Brave New Alps^^^^^, which was produced in the frame of their permanence at the residence-studio of Decolonizing Architecture in April-May 2008.

Here some extracts of the 24 hours static shot:

Flattening the sand; excavators at work

Dusk; wall patrol

Posted: 30.01.2009

Solo show

BARCELONA - 9 July – 5 September
COAC www.coac.net

Collective show

BERLIN - 14 March – 26 April 2009
Islands and Ghettos http://www.ngbk.de

ISTANBUL - 12 September – 8 Novemebr 2009
11th International İstanbul Biennial www.iksv.org/bienal/english/

ROTTERDAM - 24 September 2009- 10 January 2010
4th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Refuge www.iabr.nl/

Posted: 20.12.2008

DECOLONIZATION MANUAL
Conception and design overview by Salottobuono
Landscape design and models by Situ Studio, NYC
Psagot re-design: Barbara Modolo, Pietro Onofri, Armina Pilav, Rana Shakaa, Manuel Singer, Alessandro Zorzetto
Videos: Roberto Sartor; photos Barbara Modolo

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BATTLE FOR THE HILLTOP
Oush Grab re-design: Mario Abruzzese, Jiries Boullata, Sara Pellegrini, Francesca Vargiu
Landscape design and models by Situ Studio, NYC

ARCHIVE OF ARCHIVES
Video DVD, interviews and seminars with NGOs edited by Allegra Martin, Library: Rianne Van Doeveren

CONFLICT DIARY
Interview with George Rashmawi
Video DVD 24’ 19” loop, 2008
edited by Roberto Sartor

THE ENDLESS PRESENT
Documentary photographs and proposals
Slide show by Sara Pellegrini
Photos Barbara Modolo

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FUTURE ARCHAEOLOGY
Stereoscopic video installation
Psagot/ElBireh, DVD Blueray 12’ 17” loop, 2008
Oush Grab, DVD Blueray 4’ 45” loop, 2008
by Armin Linke, Francesco Mattuzzi and Renato Rinaldi

DESIGN BY DESTRUCTION: GAZA 2005
Video projection, DVD 2’ 19” loop, 2008
Part 1: “What’s next?”, Dugit, Gaza Strip 2005, by Nadav Harel
Part 2: “Access”, Gaza Strip 2005 by Mohammed G.
Edited by Roberto Sartor
Photos Francesco Mattuzzi

Posted: 20.10.2008

Posted: 01.09.2008

Decolonizing Architecture will be soon shown in two european exhibitions.
At first in Gemak Gallery (Den Haag, Holland) in the frame of No Man’s Land? exhibition from 6th September to 31st October.
www.gemak.org

Afterwards inside the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Padiglione Italia, from 10th September to 23rd November.
www.labiennale.org

The final set will be shown at the Bozar (Bruxelles) from 31st October to 4th January.
www.bozar.be

Posted: 17.06.1008

Stateless Nation - Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti

Architects and artists Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti of Decolonizing Architecture present their exhibition and long term research stateless nation presented at the Venice biennale 2003. The work explores the current Palestinian condition, including suffering military occupation, undergoing alienation in one’s own native land, and exile. In particular the work investigates and observes the new relationships between territory, state and populations, and further reflects the new meanings and implications of this on the physical and social Palestinian experience of space.

21.06.08 at Henry Moore Institute in Leeds

Posted: 17.06.2008

There will be a preview of Decolonizing Architecture within the project Islands + Ghettos taking place at the Heidelberger Kunstverein in Heidelberg from February to September 2008.
The stereoscopic videos by Armin Linke and Francesco Mattuzzi will be shown during the exhibition (from 06.06. to 31.08.2008) and Alessandro Petti will give a lecture about the project on the 18th of June.

Posted: 16.06.2008

The Oush Grab story continues. The Grand Tour aims to connect the entire park from the Plaza to the Paidia Adventure Gardens to the Archaeological Site. We mapped a nature path to identify points of access and optimal panoramic views.

Posted: 09.06.2008

1000 THOUGHTS IN 1 BETHLEHEM NIGHT
A series of informal meetings designed to open up a space for the exchange of thoughts and project developments.

11, June 2008, 07.30 pm

Mujaawara vs. Decolonization
The importance of perceptions, references, and relationships

The choice of words and meanings reflect our references, and form our perceptions, and control our relationships… This has been detrimental in the case of the Palestinians; and we don’t seem to be healing from it…

I am choosing the word decolonization as an example of rootless words, and suggesting the word mujaawara instead, as a nurturing tooted word…

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Munir Fasheh was born in Jerusalem in 1941, forced out in 1948 and since
then has been living basically in Ramallah. He taught math and physics at Birzeit University and in the United States. He worked with West Bank schools for 5 years in the 1970s. And later established Tamer Institute in Ramallah in 1989. In 1997, he established the Arab Education Forum at Harvard University’s Middle Eastern Studies department. He resigned in October 2007 and came back to Ramallah. The common thread of his work since 1971 has been how to build on what is abundant, beautiful,
inspiring, and healthy in people, communities, and
in culture…

Posted: 09.06.2008

Residents and international volunteers in Bethlehem along with Decolonizing Architecture have initiated two days of spatial interventions at the site of Oush Grab. This intervention included establishing Oush Grab Plaza and the grand opening of Nest Cafe. Also included in the activites was our mobile shade structure.

Posted: 25.05.2008

A Trilogy on Tehran

Today Iran’s population is twice as big as it was before the revolution of 1978. Over 70% of the population is younger than 25. About 80% of the society can read and write. Before the revolution only 40% of the Iranians could do so. Young people are self confident. They are on their way to change the society, although slowly but certainly. Through these changes, conflicts between the generations obviously grow. One effect is the increasing number of young people, who run away from their homes. Most of them are girls between 15 and 18 years.

The documentary Good Times/Bad Times is about five young people, each as a representative of a certain group in the Iranian society, whereas the so called ‘Run away Girls’ are absent. Because, although they are visible in the city, in the society they mainly seem to be invisible. And, as they have decided to leave their homes, I do not see the right to `present` them in front of the camera. So I decided to mention them, but not to make an eye catching subject out of them for the video.

Tehran 1380 is an attempt to go one step deeper into the city of Tehran. The city was analyzed in the first video, the new inhabitants of it shall be the subject of the second one. The camera gets closer to the characters and focuses on the city from another point of view. Without an Off-Text, and using as less obvious explanations as possible, images shall get more importance. The video is a description of one moment. It has no definite ending, just as no thesis exists about the next future of the Iranian society.

Persepolis is the third video of the Tehran Trilogy. The title of the work is the name of a modern high rise building in north Tehran in which the author lives. It’s a collection of the memory of Tehran. Neighbors of different ages describe the city in different times. Neither the person nor the city is visible. Voices and images of living-rooms are the only elements through which the viewer can imagine the city and its inhabitants.

Excerpt from a text in Flash Art, Chus Martinez (2006):

Urban Development in Istanbul: The Compounds (new work)
The new upper classes have found homes in the prosperous pettiness and civic mindedness of the gated communities. The insipid colors of the high buildings match the green grass of the tennis courts as well as the turquoise of the inviting but lonely swimming pools. Removed from the loud and moody mass movements of people and traffic in the streets of downtown Istanbul, these compounds are built around the notion of difference. This difference leaves behind a pleasing feeling of self-sufficiency: it suggests, vaguely but intensely, that the country beyond the limits of the compound moves towards a regulated future, a promise of sustainable happiness perhaps with space for a few more – but who knows… Difference alone is not enough to elicit pleasure… The term exotic is normally attached to more colorful and faraway things than these strange wastelands in the middle of nowhere, quite disconnected from the city center. In this way, the work features a new twist on exoticism: the private club as the perfect platform for a rehearsal of life removed from the inconveniencies of life itself.

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Solmaz Shahbazi was born in Tehran in 1971, and now divides her time between Germany and Iran. She completed her studies in fine arts and architecture at the Akademie der bildenden Kuenste in Germany in 2000, and since then, has been producing video and photographic works. She uses the documentary format in both her videos and her photography as a tool to analyse different modes of imagery, expectations of the unknown and affecting perception. Her collection of images testify to the potentially fictitious nature of the photographic medium, providing a view as to how we filter images, formulate conceptions—and ultimately awakening us to the fallibility of preconception, the power of the photographic frame. In addition to the 7th Sharjah Biennial, the 9th International Istanbul Biennial in 2005 and 1st Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art Shahbazi’s work has been exhibited widely in Europe, USA and the Middle East since 2001.

Posted: 19.05.2008

Today Sandi Hilal and Alessandro petti will present Decolonizing Architecture in Siena. Piergiorgio Solinas, Massimiliano Tabusi and Pietro Pustorino will also talk in this occasion. The event is in collaboration with Hawiyya.

Posted: 17.05.2008

Today Fabio, Bianca, Jesse and Anne have been painting in Oush Grab in order to re-de-colonize the space which had been visually occupied by israeli settlers. The zionist writings on one building and on the water tower were first nicely covered with a thick layer of white paint. Hotel Oush Grab was then set up in the first building. 3 confortable suites in a peaceful location and with a super nice view of the surrounding palestinian landscape. Soon Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Ghandi came and moved in. Che Guevara, Edward Said and Aung San Suu Kyi are expected to come after them, so no rooms will be free for settlers for a long time…

Puzzling creative visual resistance: The buildings of Oush Grab after the re-occupation by the settlers and after the artists’ détournement

Posted: 06.05.2008

Last night our friend Andrea Merli visited us and showed us some stunning fotos he took in Gaza, in areas where Israeli colonies used to be. Some of them, like Netzarim and Nisanit, apparently have been completely erased from the landscape. Nothing of the settlement, except some streets and the green houses (the only cultivated land) is there anymore.

Posted: 05.05.2008

Tomorrow Eyal Weizman will be giving a lecture about Decolonizing Architecture at REDCAT - CalArts Theatre in Los Angeles. Link

Posted: 05.05.2008

Julien Lagumier, a French social anthropologist, will be talking about French colonial architecture and social housing through the issue of utopia/ heterotopia:

The global issue of how utopian models in term of conception have turned to heterotopias, while finished and appropriated by the populations because of social changes, conflicts, and segregation. I’ll present Casablanca and Algiers as two examples of French colonial cities under the influence of the ideas of modern architecture and social progress in the 60’s despite the colonial context. We’ll see how these models still reproduce the domination on local people and try to explain how they decolonized it after independence. In the same period, in France, the government answered to a strong housing crisis by applying the modern architecture principles and building housing schemes. Forty years later, these places host the poorer people, realize a perfect segregation. I’ll present how we try to answer this issue through real projects of renewal. The links between colonial architecture and housing schemes for social housing is that Algeria and Morocco have been a place of experimentations for French engineers and architects to conceive new models which have been brought back to France.

Posted: 04.05.2008

Today Yazid Anani brought about 30 students of his students (Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture program at Birzeit University) to the former military base of Oush Grab (Beit Sahur). They will develop projects that deal with the decolonization of this site.

Posted: 04.05.2008

A preview of the project will be shown at this year’s Architecture Biennale. More info soon.

Posted: 03.05.2008

There will be a preview of Decolonizing Architecture within the project Islands + Ghettos taking place at the Heidelberger Kunstverein in Heidelberg from February to September 2008.
The stereoscopic videos by Armin Linke and Francesco Mattuzzi will be shown during the exhibition (from 06.06. to 31.08.2008) and Alessandro Petti will give a lecture about the project on the 18th of June.

Posted: 30.04.2008

Tonight ^^^Brave New Alps^^^^^ are presenting their alternative travel guide Decode Jerusalem.

Posted: 29.04.2008

Tonight at 8:00 PM Alessandro Petti is giving a lecture about Decolonizing Architecture at the Alternative Information Center. The audio of the event will be recorded and put as a podcast on the AIC website.

Posted: 18.04.2008

Tomorrow, from 4:30 to 6:00 PM, Alessandro petti will hold a lecture about Decolonizing Architecture in Beirut at Ashkal Alwan - The Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts. The lecture will be part of Home Works IV: A Forum on Cultural Practices, with exhibitions, lectures, panels, dance, performances, film and video screenings, and publications (April 12 to 20, 2008). See the whole program here.

Posted: 13.04.2008

The web platform for Decolonizing Architecture is going to be ready soon.