Eyal Weizman
 Eyal Weizman     (architect, academic, author) | ||||||||||||
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| Born | July 1970 | |||||||||||
| Alma mater | Architectural Association, London Consortium | |||||||||||
| Member of | Belmarsh Tribunal | |||||||||||
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Eyal Weizman is a British Israeli architect. He is the director of the research agency Forensic Architecture at University of London/Goldsmiths where he is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and a founding director there of the Centre for Research Architecture at the department of Visual Cultures. In 2019 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.[1]
From 2014 to 2024, Eyal Weizman was a Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ).[2]
Three Genocides
In the April 2024 edition of the London Review of Books, Eyal Weizman wrote an article entitled "Three Genocides", which began:
- "On 11 January 2024, at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, South Africa argued that Israel’s actions in Gaza have been ‘genocidal in character’, since ‘they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group.’ Lawyers cited the killing of 23,000 Palestinians (the number is now more than 33,000), the majority of them women and children, the destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, and the displacement of practically Gaza’s entire population.
- "Israel staged its defence the following day, claiming that ‘if there were acts of genocide, they have been perpetrated against Israel.’ Its lawyers called on the court to dismiss the case and reject South Africa’s request that military operations against Gaza be halted."
"Three Genocides" concluded:
- "There are ‘worrying similarities between what was played out in South West Africa and what is being played out today in Gaza’, as Didier Fassin wrote a few weeks after 7 October. In both cases, the mass killing, destruction and displacements followed humiliating military defeats by people they thought to be inferior. The Nama and Ovaherero traditional authorities insist on the recognition of these historical continuities: ‘Our shared experience of settler colonialism and apartheid becomes a platform from which we do not claim for singularity but rather pursue global justice and a quest for solidarity and universal freedom.’ It is important to listen to these voices. Such continuities could bring together the history of the Holocaust with that of colonialism and enslavement, allowing the historical solidarity between Blacks and Jews, and between anti-Zionist Jews and Palestinians, to be recognised.
- "Israel and Germany’s insistence on the singularity and uniqueness of the Holocaust opens a gap between the histories of antisemitism and racism to such a degree that these two forms of political power fuelled by hatred are pitted against each other. In this context it’s inspiring that the Nama and Ovaherero groups decided to respond to the political atmosphere of censorship and intimidation that greets any expression of support for Palestinians – something they experienced when they visited Berlin in December. ‘It is also with concern that we note attacks against voices from activists from Palestine, the Global South, the Muslim world, as well as dissident Jewish artists and scholars speaking out against Israeli policies. We stand with them because we know what it means to speak truth to repressive powers, and what are the consequences of such acts’."[3]
Background
Eyal Weizman was born in Haifa, Israel. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London, and completed his PhD at the London Consortium.
Architecture career
In 2007 he was a founding member of the architectural collective Decolonising Architecture (DAAR) 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". He has also published many articles on Israeli geography and architecture.[4] 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.
Books
- 1998 (with Christian Nicolas) Random Walk, London: Architectural Association
- 2000 Yellow Rhythms, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers
- 2003 (with Rafi Segal) Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, Verso
- 2003 (with Anselm Franke) Territories, Builders and Warrior, Rotterdam: Witte de With Press
- 2003 (with Anselm Franke) Territories, Camps, Islands and other States of Utopia, Berlin and Cologne: Kunst Werke and Walter Koenig Press
- 2004 (with Anselm Franke) Territories, The Frontiers of Utopia and other Facts on the Ground, Cologne: Walther Koenig Press
- 2007 Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, Verso
- 2011 The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, Verso
- 2012 (with Thomas Keenan) Mengele's Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics, Sternberg Press/Portikus
- 2012 Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums (dOCUMENTA 13 notebook n.062), Hatje Cantz
- 2013 (with Ines Weizman) Before and After, Moscow: Strelka Press
- 2014 (with Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal) Architecture After Revolution, Berlin: Sternberg Press
- 2014 (with Forensic Architecture) FORENSIS, Berlin: Sternberg Press
- 2015 The Roundabout Revolution, Berlin: Sternberg Press
- 2015 (with photography by Fazal Sheikh) The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert, Göttingen: Steidl and Cabinet Books. ISBN 978-3-95829-035-8
- 2017 Hollow Land: The Architecture of Israel's Occupation, Third and updated edition (with an additional chapter) London and NYC: Verso Books
- 2017 Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics (in Spanish), Barcelona and Mexico City: MACBA/MUAC (NYT/Spanish top ten non-fiction books of 2017)
- 2017 Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, NYC: MIT/Zone Books
- 2021 (with Matthew Fuller) Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, London: Verso
- 2021 The Police Shooting of Mark Duggan: Forensic Architecture Reports, New York: Cabinet books and London: ICA books
References
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