FORENSiS: Space and Violence at the Threshold of Detectibility – Eyal Weizman – March 16th at 6pm

The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility hosts a lecture by Eyal Weizman entitled “FORENSiS: Space and Violence at the Threshold of Detectibility.”

Forensic Architecture turns its counter forensic gaze to the frontiers of contemporary war. Forensic Architecture, an agency composed of artists, filmmakers and architectural researchers, uses architecture and its media representations to analyse and respond to political conflicts in Israel/Palestine, environmental violence in Guatemala and their research for the UN on drone warfare in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. Weizman will show how architectural methods and new sensing technologies could be used to expose the logic of violent conflict while raising a host of conceptual problems to do with the thresholds of vision and law.

Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Visual Cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011 he also directs the European Research Council funded project, Forensic Architecture – on the place of architecture in international humanitarian law. Since 2007 he is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine . 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 Stadel School in Frankfurt and is a Professeur invité at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include Mengele’s Skull (with Thomas Keenan at Sterenberg Press 2012),Forensic Architecture (dOCUMENTA13 notebook, 2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (Nottetempo 2009, Verso 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003), the series Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books. Weizman is a regular contributor and an editorial board member for several journals and magazines including Humanity, Inflexions and Cabinet where he has edited a special issue on forensics (issue 43, 2011). He has worked with a variety of NGOs world wide and was member of B’Tselem board of directors. He is currently on the advisory boards of the Institue of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, the Human Rights Project at Bard in NY, and of other academic and cultural institutions. Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-2007, a co-recipient of the 2010 Prince Claus Prize for Architecture (for DAAR) and was invited to deliver the Rusty Bernstein, Paul Hirst, Nelson Mandela, Mansour Armaly and the Edward Said Memorial Lectures amongst others. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium/Birkbeck College.

The event is part of the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility 2014-15 Lecture Series “Rethinking Refugee Spaces: Architecture, Design, and Politics,” and co-sponsored by Parsons School of Constructed Environments and Parsons School of Design Strategies.

Monday March 16th 2015 at 6pm

Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang College (B500)

65 West 11th street New York NY