The first U.S. exhibition

Posted: 21.12.2010

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December 7, 2010 – February 6, 2011
REDCAT
inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA

The exhibition centers on three recent projects:

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Oush Grab – Return to Nature

In May 2006, the Israeli army evacuated the military fortress of Oush Grab [meaning the Crow’s Nest in Arabic] strategically located on one the highest hills at the southern edge to the Palestinian city of Beit Sahour in the Bethlehem region.

On the summit several concrete buildings formed the heart of the fortress. Throughout the Intifada the Israeli military piled sand and rubble in a giant circle around the hill, which made it appear like a crater of an artificial volcano.The buildings, damaged and evacuated, resembled edifices of a ghost town, abandoned after some mysterious disaster.
Since its evacuation, groups of settlers have attempted to establish a new settlement within Oush Grab. The fight for the hilltop has taken place as activists, settlers and the military clash on site and in courts.
The hilltop is also a point of natural singularity. It serves as one of the main sites where birds— — starlings, storks and raptors— – land to rest on their seasonal migration between North-east Europe and East Africa every spring and fall. Around them a rich micro-ecology of small predators and other wildlife gathers. The scene is at once breathtaking and terrifying, and the inhabitants of Beit Sahour now joke that the flocks of migrating birds are the real reason behind the military evacuation.
Our intention seeks to accelerate the processes of destruction and disintegration. It is an architectural project for obsolescence, where the “ghost town” of the former military base is gradually “returned to nature.”

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Red castle and the lawless line

In 1993, a series of secret talks held in Oslo between Israeli and Palestinian representatives inaugurated what was later referred to as the “Oslo Process.” As is well known, this process defined three types of territories within the West Bank: Area A under Palestinian control, Area B under Israeli military control and Palestinian civilian control, and Area C under full Israeli control. When the process collapsed and the temporary organization of the occupied territories solidified into a permanently splintered geography of multiple separations and prohibitions, a fourth space had suddenly been discovered.
Existing in between, this space was the width of the line that separates the three areas. Less than a millimeter thick when drawn on the scale of 1:20,000, it measured 5.5 meters in real space. The Red castle and the lawless line delves into the thickness of this line, and follows it along the edges of villages and towns, across fields, olive and fruit orchards, roads, gardens, kindergartens, fences, terraces, homes, public buildings, a football stadium, a mosque and finally a recently constructed large castle. Within this line is a zone undefined by law, a legal limbo that acts like a vortex to pull in all the forces, institutions, organizations and characters that operate within and around it.
With areas A, B and C already claimed by different forms of cooperating governments that rule the West Bank, the thickness of the line might become an extraterritorial territory. Perhaps, “all that remains” for Palestine is, a thin but powerful space for potential political transformations.
Political spaces in Palestine are not defined by legal zones, but operate through legal voids. Investigating the clash of geopolitical lines onto the domestic space of the castle, and operating on the margin between architecture, cartography and legal practice, we seek to bring up a legal case that calls for an anarchic regime of political autonomy to inhabit this line. It is from these seam lines—, small tears in the territorial system—, that the entire system of divisions may finally be torn down.

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How to inhabit the house of your enemy?

Historical processes of decolonization tended to see the reuse of the buildings and infrastructure left behind in the same way they were designed for, leaving some of the power hierarchies of the colonial world intact.
This project deals with the one of the most difficult questions of decolonization: how to inhabit the colonies and military bases to be evacuated in the future archaeology of Israel’s occupation?
Concentrating on the settlement of Psagot near Ramallah, the guiding principle was not to eliminate the power of the occupation’s built spaces, nor simply to reuse it in the way it was designed for, but rather to reorient its logic to other aims.
Psagot, like other settlements, is suburban when thought of in relation to the Jewish geography in the occupied territories These settlements are fenced up bedroom communities fed by a growing matrix of roads and other infrastructure, but they must be articulated as potentially urban when considered in relation to the Palestinian cities besides which they were built.