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 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