Eyal Weizman MBE FBA (born 1970) is a British Israeli architect. He is the director of the research agency Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London where he is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and a founding director there of the Centre for Research Architecture [1] at the department of Visual Cultures. In 2019 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.
Eyal Weizman was born in Haifa, Israel. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London, and completed his PhD at the London Consortium. [2]
In 2007 he was a founding member of the architectural collective Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR) [3] in Beit Sahour in the West Bank, Palestinian territories. Weizman has been a professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at The Bartlett (UCL) in London at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. Weizman's most known theoretical work describes the acts of the Israeli army as founded upon the post-structuralist French philosophers and a reading of them. He also conducted research on behalf of B’tselem on the "planning aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank". [4] He has also published many articles on Israeli geography and architecture. [5] [6] [7] In 2013 he designed a permanent folly in Gwangju, South Korea which was documented in the book The Roundabout Revolution (Sternberg, 2015). In 2010 he established the agency Forensic Architecture, which provide advanced architectural and media evidence to civil society groups, with the help of several European Research Council grants, as well as other human rights grants. Forensic Architecture undertook research for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors without Borders (MSF), the Red Cross (ICRC), and the United Nations.
In 2017, he was a guest speaker at the 17th edition of the Sonic Acts Festival: The Noise of Being (Amsterdam). Since 2019 he is a guest professor at ETH Zurich. Between 2014 and 2017 he was a Global Scholar at Princeton University.
In February 2020, Weizman was informed by email that his right to travel to the United States under a visa waiver program had been revoked. He was later informed by an official of the US Embassy in London that an algorithm had identified a security threat that was related to him. [8]
Weizman is on the editorial board of Third Text, Humanity, Cabinet and Political Concepts and is a board member of the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) and of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and sat on the board of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem in Jerusalem.
He is currently on the advisory boards of the Human Rights Project at Bard College in New York, [9] as a jury member for architecture in the Akademie Schloss Solitude and of other academic and cultural institutions. In 2014 Weizman was featured in "The Architecture of Violence", a film produced for the series Rebel Architecture broadcast by Al Jazeera English. [10]
Weizman has spoken against Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Speaking about the Israeli military targeting of civilians, Weizman said he "can't see it anything other than a part of the genocidal campaign". [11] Work done by Weizman, as part of Forensic Architecture, has countered Israel's defense in South Africa's genocide case against Israel. Summarizing the report's findings, Weizman has said:
Israel’s defence at the ICJ relied greatly on it instituting these humanitarian zones, warnings and evacuation orders. And with this, they were trying to argue that actually they are trying to save lives, rather than, as accused, engaging in genocidal acts. In fact, when we looked at the correlation between evacuation orders and where people were actually sent, we saw very often people were sent to areas that had no adequate infrastructure. Furthermore, people were being attacked by the military in these zones. [12]
Weizman was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to architecture. [13]
Hollow Land
The Conflict's Shoreline
The Least of all Possible Evils
Mengele's Skull
Forensic Architecture exhibited internationally [30] including at the documenta 14 in Kassel. [31] In 2017 Forensic Architecture had two major museum exhibitions at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) [32] and at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC). [33] In 2018 Forensic Architecture held a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London. [34] Forensic Architecture's work is included in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Josef Rudolf Mengele was a German Schutzstaffel (SS) officer and physician during World War II at the Russian front and then at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, where he was nicknamed the "Angel of Death". He performed deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) concentration camp, where he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers, and was one of the doctors who administered the gas.
Benny Morris is an Israeli historian. He was a professor of history in the Middle East Studies department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the city of Beersheba, Israel. Morris was initially associated with the group of Israeli historians known as the "New Historians", a term he coined to describe himself and historians Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé and Simha Flapan.
James Heartfield is a British lecturer and historian.
A community settlement is a type of town or village in Israel and in the West Bank. In an ordinary town, anyone may buy property, but in a community settlement, the village's residents are organized in a cooperative and have the power to approve or to veto a sale of a house or a business to any buyer. Residents of a community settlement may have a particular shared ideology, religious perspective or desired lifestyle, which they wish to perpetuate by accepting only like-minded individuals. For example, a family-oriented community settlement that wishes to avoid becoming a retirement community may choose to accept only young married couples as new residents.
Costas Douzinas is a professor of law, a founder of the Birkbeck School of Law and the Department of Law of the University of Cyprus, the founding director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, the President of the Nikos Poulantzas Institute and a former politician.
Cellebrite DI Ltd. is an Israeli digital intelligence company that provides tools for federal, state, and local law enforcement as well as enterprise companies and service providers to collect, review, analyze and manage digital data. On April 8, 2021, Cellebrite announced plans to go public via a merger with a blank-check firm, valuing the company at approximately $2.4 billion. Their flagship product series is the Cellebrite UFED.
Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) is an architectural studio, collective of architects and a residency program based in Beit Sahour, Palestine. DAAR was established to work on complex architectural problems in a region with strongly conflicting political forces, and is related to the Decolonizing Architecture Art Research collective.
Sednaya Prison, nicknamed the "Human Slaughterhouse" is a military prison near Damascus in Syria operated by the Syrian government. The prison has been used to hold thousands of prisoners, both civilian detainees and anti-government rebels. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) estimated in January 2021 that 30,000 detainees have perished in Sednaya from torture, ill-treatment and mass executions since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War, while Amnesty International estimated in February 2017 "that between 5,000 and 13,000 people were extrajudicially executed at Saydnaya between September 2011 and December 2015."
Michel Feher is a Belgian philosopher and cultural theorist who writes in English and French. He is the founding editor of Zone Books and the co-founder and president of Cette France-là, Paris, a monitoring group on French immigration policy. Feher writes for a number of outlets and has a semi-regular blog with the French journal Mediapart. He has held the positions of Professor and Visiting Lecturer at various universities, including École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the University of California, Berkeley, and most recently, Goldsmiths, University of London.
A rhizome manoeuvre is a surprise attack in a built environment, made from an unexpected direction, such as through a wall or floor. It is a key concept in contemporary warfare tactics, techniques, and procedures.
Caroline Sturdy Colls is a British archaeologist and academic, specializing in Holocaust studies, identification of human remains, forensic archaeology and crime scene investigation. She is Professor of Holocaust Archaeology and Genocide Investigation at University of Huddersfield, and serves as director for the Centre of Archaeology there. Previously she was a Professor and Director of the Centre of Archaeology at Staffordshire University. Prof Sturdy Colls also undertakes consultancy for the UK Police forces. Her main area of interest is the methodology of investigation into the Holocaust and genocide murder sites with special consideration given to ethical and religious norms associated with the prohibition of excavating a grave.
Shlomo Gur (Gerzovsky) (1913-2000), founder member of Kibbutz Tel Amal, is credited with creating and then managing the construction of 57 homa u'migal during the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine. Following the establishment of the state of Israel, he was project manager of the Hebrew University, the National Library and the Knesset.
Matthew Fuller is an author and Professor of Cultural Studies at the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is known for his writings in media theory, software studies, critical theory and cultural studies, and contemporary fiction.
Agriculture in the State of Palestine is a mainstay in the economy of the State of Palestine. The production of agricultural goods supports the population's sustenance needs and fuels Palestine's export economy. According to the Council for European Palestinian Relations, the agricultural sector formally employs 13.4% of the population and informally employs 90% of the population. In the late 2000s unemployment rates in Palestine increased and the agricultural sector became the most impoverished sector in Palestine. Unemployment rates peaked in 2008 when they reached 41% in Gaza.
Markus Miessen is a German architect and writer.
Forensic Architecture is a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London that uses architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world. The group is led by architect Eyal Weizman. He received a Peabody Award in 2021 for his work with Forensic Architecture.
Land expropriation in the West Bank refers to the practices employed by the State of Israel to take over Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank. From 1969 to 2019 Israel had issued over 1,150 military seizure orders alone to that purpose.
Anselm Franke is a German curator, and writer. He was the head of Visual Art and Film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt from 2013–2022.
Ivana Franke is a Croatian contemporary visual artist who currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Sandi Hilal is a Palestinian architect, writer, and researcher. Hilal was Head of the Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Program in the West Bank at UNRWA from 2008 to 2014.
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