Tuesday 25 May 2010, 18.30–20.00

Edifices built and used under colonial rule are informed by the ideologies and power relations used in their construction. In Bethlehem, Algiers, Johannesburg or Berlin, de-colonizing the architecture of a liberated landscape is a condition for the re-negotiation of collective identities, based on new geo-political terms. This process encourages both imaginative and practical planning about the areas that already have or will be released from direct colonial control and opens up questions about the future of these sites and their inhabitants. How can the architecture of domination be reused, recycled or re-inhabited by those it dominated? What are the processes involved in planning and implementing the decolonization of a site? How can one inhabit the house of one’s enemy? 

Bethlehem-based architectural practice Decolonizing Architecture members Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman present some of the ideas that inform their work in conversation with artist Lorenzo Pezzani, Abdoumaliq Simone, urbanist and Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College and film curator Rasha Salti. Writer and editor Shumon Basar chairs the panel. 

The work of Decolonizing Architecture has been exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at Palais des Beaux Arts, Bruxelles (BOZAR, 2009), the Venice Biennale for Architecture (2008), the 11th Istanbul Biennale (2009) and the Rotterdam International Biennale of Architecture (2009).

This panel discussion is part of a series of programmes produced by Delfina Foundation and Decolonizing Architecture including a film screening of Elia Suleiman's The Time That Remains at Tate Modern on 24 May, residencies in Bethlehem, Palestine, and a concurrent exhibition at Delfina Foundation. 

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£12 (£10 concessions), booking recommended
Special Offer: Book this discussion and the Elia Suleiman film on 24 May for £15. Please tel 020 7887 8888 to book.

    

Participants biographies

Shumon Basar is a writer and editor currently working on a novel entitled 'World World World!'.

Sandi Hilal graduated in Architecture. She works as a consultant with the UNRWA on the Camp improvement program. She is a visiting professor at the International Academy of Art Palestine. She is co-curator of the project Decolonizing Architecture. In 2006 she obtained the title of research doctorate in Transborder policies for daily life in the University of Trieste. From 2001 to 2005 she has been teaching assistant in Visual Arts and Urban Studies at the IUAV University of Venice. She's a co-curator of different research projects shown internationally: Stateless Nation and Arab City Project (with Alessandro Petti), Border devices (with multiplicity). Her publications include Senza Stato una Nazione, (Marsilio, Venezia 2003); Living Among the Dead (Domus 880, April 2005); Road Map (Equilibri, August 2004), la stanza dei sogni (Liguori Editore, 2004), Stateless Nation (Archis, Preview # 4 2003). Her projects have been published in national and international newspapers and magazines: The New York Times, Il Manifesto, Al Ayyam, Al- Quds, Art Forum, and Archis.

Alessandro Petti is a Research Architect based in Bethlehem, professor at the Bard/Al-Quds University in Abu Dis and Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College University of London. He has written on the emerging spatial order dictated by the paradigm of security and control in Arcipelaghi e enclave (Archipelagos and enclaves, Bruno Mondadori, Milan 2007). His recent publications are: Future Archaeology (Afterall, February 2009) Dubai Offshore Urbanism in Heterotopia and the City (Routledge 2008), Temporary Zones. Alternative Spaces or Territories of Social-spatial Control? in Post-it City (CCCB 2008), Asymmetries of the Globalized space in The impossible prison, (Centre for Contemporary Art Nottingham 2008). He co-curated different research projects on the contemporary urban condition such as Borderdevices (2002–-2007), Uncertain States of Europe (2001–2003) with multiplicity and Stateless Nation with Sandi Hilal (2002–2007). He is also working on a research project titled 'Atlas of Decolonization', an architectural documentation of the re-use, re-inhabitation and subversion of colonial structures.

Lorenzo Pezzani was the first DF international resident at the Decolonizing Architecture studio in Bethlehem.  He is a researcher based in London. After having studied architecture at the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio in Switzerland, he engaged in 2008 in the activities of the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldsmiths) where he obtained an MA and where he is currently PhD candidate. His practice-based research projects, moving across diverse disciplines and mediums, have taken various forms (video and audio pieces, installations, publications) and have been exhibited, among others, at the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow and at the 4thInternational Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam. Lorenzo Pezzani has worked as assistant curator for Manifesta 7 and has contributed to various journals and magazines. His current work looks at how the afterlife of various "things" (buildings, monuments, migrant bodies and images) could enhance, through profanation, the production of a new postcolonial ecology. He is also contributing to the ongoing project 'Model court', which analyses the courtroom as an apparatus that produces legal 'truths' by means of various protocols of spacial and aural performativity.

Rasha Salti is an independent curator and free-lance writer, working and living between Beirut and New York City. She is also the creative director of the New York based non-profit ArteEast. She has administered a number of events, including a tribute to Edward Said titled For a Critical Culture (Beirut, 1997), and 50, Nakba and Resistance (Beirut, 1998), a three month long cultural season for the fiftieth commemoration of the tragedy of Palestine. In 2006, she curated a retrospective of Syrian cinema that toured worldwide, and on that occasion edited Insights into Syrian Cinema: Essays and Conversations with Filmmakers (ArteEast and Rattapallax Press). Salti writes about artistic practice in the Arab world, film, and general social and political commentary, in Arabic and English, in The Jerusalem Quarterly Report (Palestine), Naqd (Algeria), MERIP (USA), The London Review of Books (UK), Afterall (US). In 2009, she collaborated with photographer Ziad Antar on an exhibition and book titled Beirut Bereft, The Architecture of the Forsaken and Map of the Derelict.

AbdouMaliq Simone is a Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths. Prior to this he taught at several universities across Africa and in New York, as well as spending many years working for NGOs and applied research institutions. Selected publications include For the City yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities (Duke, 2004), 2002, Globalizing Urban Economies, Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition, Catalogue. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2004 and People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg, Public Culture 16, 3: 407-429.

Eyal Weizman is a London-based architect. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium, Birkbeck College. He is the director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College. Since 2007 he is a member of the architectural collective Decolonizing Architecture in Beit Sahour/Palestine. Since 2008 he is a member of B'Tselem board of directors. Weizman has taught, lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include The Lesser Evil (Nottetempo, 2009), Hollow Land (Verso Books, 2007), A Civilian Occupation (Verso Books, 2003), the series Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books. Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-2007.