Podcasts about research architecture

This episode is about planning in Palestine, and especially Gaza. As you all know, this is a podcast about Latin American Cities. However, right now it seems difficult to talk or think about anything other than the genocide unfolding in Palestine. Many of those of us who think critically about Latin American cities find so many connections between our histories and struggles and the settler-colonial project of Israel and its occupation of Palestine. This is particularly true when we reflect on the role of planning and architecture in cementing the occupation, dispossession and violence upon Palestinian people, and particularly Gazans. This is the focus of today's episode.  To discuss this, it is truly my privilege to host cohost, Mekarem Eljamal and our two guests, Dana Erekat and Eyal Weizman.  Dana is a Palestinian architect and planner, with a BA in architecture from UC Berkeley and an Masters in City Planing from MIT. The list of positions she has held is as impressive at it is long. Among these, she has worked with the UNDP, with the World Bank, the Kenyon Institute, and more. From 2013-2012, she was Head of Aid Management and Coordination Directorate/ Special Advisor to the Minister at the Palestinian Ministry of Planning and Administrative Development, during which she led the technical committee for the 2014 Gaza Reconstruction plan. She is currently the CEO of the data analytic company Whyise.  Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is perhaps most known as the founder and director of Forensic Architecture,  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. 

Adrian Lahoud is an architect, urban designer, researcher, and the dean of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art. Previously he was director of the MA program at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths and a research fellow at Forensic Architecture. In this conversation, Jarrett and Adrian talk about the intersection of decolonization and decarbonization, architecture as a site for posing problems, and fostering an interdisciplinary research culture. Links from this episode can be found at scratchingthesurface.fm/241-adrian-lahoud. 
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Tara Plath is a PhD student in the Film & Media Studies Department at UC Santa Barbara. She holds an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths, University of London and a BFA in Sculpture and BA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an interdisciplinary practice-based researcher whose ongoing research uses mapping and open-source investigation techniques to challenge state violence, surveillance, and militarization at the US southwest border in Arizona. In a conversation following the end of Title 42, Tara and Taylor discuss the compounding crises of disappearance and death in the Sonoran Desert; border militarization and the weaponization of humanitarian aid as part of Border Patrol's long-term strategy of Prevention Through Deterrence. Plath's transdisciplinary research and activism helps us better visualize the devastating effects of the occupation of Indigenous land throughout the Sonoran Desert and beyond, while offering methods and platforms for transborder solidarity.

Susan Schuppli is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her book, Material Witnesss, her research is an exploration of the evidential role of matter in contexts including the natural disaster, climate change, and conflict zones. In this interview she discusses her work as a writer, artist and educator. The evidential role of matter--when media records trace evidence of violence--explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milosevic; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or "disaster film" produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law

Susan Schuppli is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her book, Material Witnesss, her research is an exploration of the evidential role of matter in contexts including the natural disaster, climate change, and conflict zones. In this interview she discusses her work as a writer, artist and educator. The evidential role of matter--when media records trace evidence of violence--explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milosevic; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or "disaster film" produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/communications

Susan Schuppli is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her book, Material Witnesss, her research is an exploration of the evidential role of matter in contexts including the natural disaster, climate change, and conflict zones. In this interview she discusses her work as a writer, artist and educator. The evidential role of matter--when media records trace evidence of violence--explored through a series of cases drawn from Kosovo, Japan, Vietnam, and elsewhere. In this book, Susan Schuppli introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather. These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milosevic; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada's coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or "disaster film" produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. An artist-researcher, Schuppli offers an analysis that merges her creative sensibility with a forensic imagination rich in technical detail. Her goal is to relink the material world and its affordances with the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are talking with Daniel Fernández Pascual from the London-based duo Cooking Sections. Together with Alon Schwabe, they use food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation. In a broader sense, they examine the systems that organize the world, through food.Their output manifest in a variety of media: using site-responsive installations, performance, and video. Cooking Sections offer a mode of cultural production that navigates the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics.EPISODE NOTESTThis episode includes additional questions by Sarp Renk Özer & Jing Yi.Find more about Cooking Sections from https://www.cooking-sections.com/CLIMAVORE is a long-term project that sets out to envision seasons of food production and consumption that react to man-induced climatic events and landscape alterations.For hundreds of years, the wetlands north of Istanbul have been home to water Buffalo. Wallowland (Çamuralem) presents the outcomes of a series of metabolic surveys conducted at different times of the year. Buffalo kaymak, yoghurt, and sütlaç made from local producers are offered as tastings accompanied by field recordings and Buffalo songs aiming to enhance a cultural landscape on the verge of extinction. https://bienal.iksv.org/en/17b-artists/cooking-sections https://saltonline.org/en/2317/climavore-seasons-made-to-drift?q=cooking+sect%C4%B1ons The First Geography Congress (Turkish: Birinci Türk Coğrafya Kongresi), which was held in Ankara in 1941, separated Turkey into seven geographical regions, which are still used today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Geography_Congress,_TurkeySalmon: A Red Herring was first exhibited at Art Now, Tate Britain. As part of the project, Tate removed farmed salmon from its menus across all four Tate sites and introduced CLIMAVORE dishes instead.Set on the intertidal zone/seal-mara at Bayfield, CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones explores the environmental impact of intensive salmon aquaculture and reacts to the changing shores of Portree, Isle of Skye. Eyal Weizman 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 at the department of Visual Cultures. https://forensic-architecture.org/Tim Ingold is an anthropologist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Ingold Lüfer Koruma Timi was a campaign to protect the bluefish of the Bosphorus, urging fisher people, restaurants, and the consumers to not fish, sell, or buy younger fish, until the fish reaches its proper growth to reproduce. https://www.yesilist.com/tag/lufer-koruma-timi/The Lionfish is an invasive marine species. https://www.wri.org/research/reefs-risk-revisited/atlantic-and-caribbean-lionfish-invasion-threatens-reefs#:~:text=With%20venomous%20spines%2C%20lionfish%20have,of%20fish%20in%20the%20region.This season of Ahali Conversations is supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. The Graham provides project-based grants to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. This episode was also supported by a Moon & Stars Project Grant from the American Turkish Society.This episode was recorded on Zoom on August 25th, 2021. Interview by Can Altay. Produced by Aslı Altay & Sarp Renk Özer. Music by Grup Ses.

In the second episode of our new series on war and memory, we speak with founder of Forensic Architecture Eyal Weizman and academic Susan Schuppli on the role memory plays in testimony and witnessing. The discussion explores the different approaches to evidence in war crimes tribunals, starting with the Nuremburg trials of 1945, and explains how the contemporary work of Forensic Architecture is helping to unlock the hidden memories of the victims of state violence. Susan Schuppli is a researcher, documentary filmmaker, and artist based in the UK, whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disaster and climate change. She is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University as well as affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture and author of Material Witness, which is out on MIT Press.You can find out more on Susan's work here: https://susanschuppli.com/ Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. The author of over 15 books, he has held positions in many universities worldwide including Princeton, ETH Zurich and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and the Centre for Investigative Journalism. In 2019 he was elected life fellow of the British Academy and appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to architecture.Follow the work of Forensic Architecture here: https://forensic-architecture.org/ We would also like to thank Jacob over at Liverpool Podcast Studios.Music by Esion Noise [www.esionnoise.com] Support the show (https://www.forceswatch.net/support-our-work)

This panel discussion takes off from the work of INFRACTIONS, specifically its use of the moving image to address the colonial infrastructure and cultural dimension of fossil gas expansions. The conversation looks to discuss the relationship between ‘the situation’ of gas-fired futures, matters of cultural responsibility, survival, and refusal. Join Que Kenny, Phillip Marrii Winzer, Vernon Ah Kee, and INFRACTIONS director Rachel O’Reilly to discuss the work of doing things otherwise. Hosted by Warraba Weatherall. Que Kenny (Western Arrarnta) is a community support worker, artist and activist from Ntaria (Hermannsburg), west of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, also studying law at Deakin University, Melbourne. She has been involved in grassroots campaigns against the Northern Territory Emergency Response (‘The Intervention’) since 2007, and against Northern Territory gas fracking with the Protect Country Alliance. She has contributed to numerous fictional and environmental films and community projects, and accompanied INFRACTIONS to the Berlin and London launch. Her work has been profiled in Rolling Stone magazine and the Guardian. Phillip Marrii Winzer is a Ngarabul and Wirrayaraay Murri, a member of Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance, and former Organising Manager for Seed Indigenous Youth Climate Network. They are currently involved in activism around deaths in custody and refugee detention. In June they organized a crowd funder to buy back 20 acres of stolen land near the defunct Kingsgate Mines at Red Range, on Ngarabul country, rich in biodiversity and cultural heritage. Vernon Ah Kee is a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji, and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. His internationally renowned practice addresses ongoing colonial injustice and ancestral relations through conceptual text-based works and installations. His work, tall man (2010) used handheld camera footage of a community gathering on Palm Island following the release of the results of a coronial inquiry into Cameron Doomadgee’s death. Rachel O’Reilly is an artist, writer, curator and PhD researcher at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture. She is the director of INFRACTIONS now showing at the IMA, the final work of the ongoing project The Gas Imaginary (2013-2020). Recent curatorial collaborations include Ex-Embassy, Berlin; Planetary Records: Performing Justice between Art and Law, Contour Biennale; and Feminist Takes on Black Wave Film for Sternberg Press. She writes with Jelena Vesic on Non-Aligned Movement legacies and Danny Butt on artistic autonomy. She teaches How to Do Things with Theory at the Dutch Art Institute.

River systems and the molecular body Margarida Mendes Curator, researcher and activist Lisbon, 12 November 2020 Can we actually trace the exact perimeter of a river’s molecular cartography and the extent of the consequences that these systems of catalytic flux have within and outside living bodies? River systems and their surrounding infrastructures are enormous hydrogeological, chemical and electromagnetic systems that connect their surrounding inhabitants and ecosystems through an irreverent flux of discharges and motions that humans attempt to tame through flowage rights and coastal restoration projects. Hence, aquatic and riverine infrastructures are essential points of departure for system analysis and reflection about the bodies and ecosystems, from the molecular through to the planetary scale. In attempting to understand the connection between river flux, noise, toxicity, and industrialization, I will focus on the habitats of the Mississippi and the Tagus rivers, questioning how the level of background noise and chemical imbalance may be connected with endocrinological disruptions. By investigating the chemical and vibrational continuity between bodies and the environment, I will speculate how different ontologies and mechanisms for sensing and registry might be needed, in order to provide a deeper debate about ecosystems under distress. Margarida Mendes Margarida Mendes's research explores the overlap between cybernetics, ecology and experimental film, investigating environmental transformations and their impact on societal structures and cultural production. She is interested in exploring alternative modes of education and political resilience through her collaborative practice, programming, and activism. She was part of the curatorial team of the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), 4th Istanbul Design Biennial (2018), and 11th Liverpool Biennial (rescheduled for 2021). In 2019 she launched the exhibition series Plant Revolution! which questions the interspecies encounter while exploring different narratives of technological mediation and in 2016 curated Matter Fictions, publishing a joint reader with Sternberg Press. She is a consultant for environmental NGOs working on marine policy and deep sea mining and has directed several educational platforms, such as escuelita, an informal school at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo - CA2M, Madrid (2017); The Barber Shop project space in Lisbon dedicated to transdisciplinary research (2009-16); and the ecological inquiry curatorial research platform The World In Which We Occur/Matter in Flux, (2014-18). She is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths, University of London with the project “Deep Sea Imaginings” and is a frequent collaborator on the online channel for exploratory video and documentary reporting Inhabitants-tv.org. http://goldsmiths.academia.edu/MargaridaMendes https://soundcloud.com/margaridamendes http://www.twwwo.org Organised by CADA

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Daniel Mann – Healing and Killing in the Underground 22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands London-based filmmaker and writer Daniel Mann explores how image production shapes perceptions of armed conflict, colonisation and climate emergency. His films have screened internationally, including Motza el hayam (Low Tide) (2017) which premiered at the Berlinale’s Forum, and Salarium which was presented at the Sonic Acts Academy in 2018. Daniel Mann’s talk, titled Healing and Killing in the Underground, features a screening of an episode from Eitan Efrat’s and Mann’s film The Magic Mountain (2020). Thinking the surface of the Earth against its volume is tracing the very limits of representation. Underneath the ground, human bodies become surfaces upon which the land leaves its mark, imprinted directly into the cells and tissue. While the landscapes outside are captured and mediated in the form of postcards, paintings, snapshots and films that appeal to the naked eye, a rare energy leaks through the crevices in the stone below, before it is inhaled into the lungs, absorbed and consumed through the skin. Underground the body is the postcard of the subsoil. Daniel Mann is a London-based filmmaker and writer. Mann explores the role of image production and circulation in shaping collective perceptions of armed conflict, colonisation and climate emergency. His 2017 film Salarium, co-directed with Sasha Litvintseva, was presented at the Sonic Acts Academy in 2018. His writing has appeared in journals such as Media, Culture & Society and World Records and his films have screened internationally at festivals including Berlinale (Forum). Mann holds a PhD from Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. As a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Film Studies Department, King’s College London, he is developing a new project on the role of Middle Eastern desert environments in cinematic depictions of war, conflict and future annihilation.

Susan Schuppli is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. In her book, Material Witnesss, her research is an exploration of the evidential role of matter in contexts including the natural disaster, climate change, and conflict zones. In this interview she discusses her work as a writer, artist and educator. 

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Nabil Ahmed – Ecocide Forensics 22 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands As founder of the project INTERPRT, artist, writer, researcher and musician Nabil Ahmed makes a clarion call for international criminal law to protect against ecological impunity. The environmental justice project that has worked with Princeton and renowned art institutions leans on spatial design to consider ecological visual culture, investigating at-risk regions like bio-diverse and conflict-ridden West Papua/​Indonesia, endowed with the planet’s largest reserve of copper and gold. International criminal justice offers considerably limited protection to the environment and to the livelihoods and dignity of peoples. In West Papua, where the Papuans are fighting the longest self-determination struggle in the Pacific, the Indonesian state and minerals, natural gas and palm oil corporations are getting away with ecocide and crimes against humanity. Yet today, civil society groups, NGOs and journalists have expanded access to geospatial information, audiovisual media and open-source data to expose state violence and corporate crimes. Forensic truths acquired by non-state actors are increasingly admitted in legal contexts and for advocacy purposes. This lecture explores how spatial analysis and environmental forensics are put to work by INTERPRT to not only document underreported environmental offenses and human rights violations, but also in an effort to recognise ecocide as an international crime. First invoked during the Vietnam War, ecocide has the potential to be an effective tool for climate frontline governments and civil society in the fight against ecological impunity at the international criminal court and beyond. Nabil Ahmed holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is affiliated with Forensic Architecture. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Academy of Fine Art in the architecture and design faculty at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is also founder of INTERPRT, which investigates environmental crimes using spatial analysis and advocates for the criminalisation of ecocide under international law. The group collaborates with international lawyers, research centres and civil society such as Princeton Science & Global Security and Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, and has exhibited projects at venues including Biennale Warszawa/​Modern Art Museum in Warsaw and the Beirut Art Centre. INTERPRT is commissioned by TBA21 – Academy. Ahmed has written for Third Text, Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge and Architectural Review among others and is published in numerous books.

Imani Jacqueline Brown is a New Orleans native, artist, activist, researcher, and writer. Her work attempts to expose the layers of oppression, injustice, resistance, and refusal that make up the aggregate of our society's foundation stones. Imani received her Master of Arts in Research Architecture at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a co-founder of Blights Out, a collective of artists, activists, and architects working to demystify and democratize development in post-Katrina New Orleans. Visit Mondo Bizarro for more information and to donate. Our theme music is by Rotary Downs. 

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 – HEREAFTER Ramon Amaro – AI as an Act of Thought 23 February – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands With an introduction by Juha van 't Zelfde. Artificial intelligence (AI) research has risen exponentially in the last decade. One of the stated goals of AI is a better understanding of the world around us. As such, an increasingly large proportion of human reality is now lived through algorithms. While our relationship with AI is undoubtedly important as a mode of knowledge production, it has far-reaching implications. Most significant is the disparity between the act of existing/existence – particularly as it relates to differential human states of being (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) – and predominant paradigms of epistemological operation. In this talk, Ramon Amaro discusses the domain of AI as an arrangement of axiomatic simplicity that, in its present form, diminishes the variant domains of psychological and physical reality. He argues for a return to the problematics of perception, as illustrated in debates between figuration and Black abstract art, to challenge the notion of an a priori analytics. Ultimately, he proposes a reorientation of the algorithmic as an ontological imperative that establishes the genesis of the human differential as an act of thought in itself. Ramon Amaro is Lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as in the Centre for Research Architecture where he teaches the MA special subject Conflicts & Negotiations and the BA courses Fact of Blackness and Space and Time. Previously, he was a Research Fellow in Digital Culture at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and a visiting tutor in Media Theory at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), The Hague. Ramon completed his PhD in Philosophy at Goldsmiths, while holding a master’s degree in Sociological Research from the University of Essex and a BSe in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has worked as Assistant Editor for the SAGE open access journal Big Data & Society, quality design engineer for General Motors and programmes manager for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). His research interests include machine learning, design and engineering, black ontology and philosophies of being.

The logic – or perversion – of the notion of origin has been linked to different imaginaries and economic regimes of nation-states; to such an extent, that it is no longer clear who constructs whom, if it ever was. In this lecture- performance, geocultural understandings of origin will be tasted through food as method to understand whether a territory is defined by its original produce; or whether origin itself might have eventually superseded the geography that was supposed to define it. The analysis of quality and standards in relationship to a created original serves as a basis to explore how food empires construct perceptions of space and time as other forms of power. Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners that emerged out of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. It was born to explore the systems that organize the WORLD through FOOD. Using installation, performance, mapping and video, their research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture and geopolitics. Their work has been exhibited at the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin; Storefront for Art & Architecture New York dOCUMENTA(13); Peggy Guggenheim Collection; CA2M; TEDx Talks, Madrid; Fiorucci Art Trust; ACC, Weimar; 2014 Biennale INTERIEUR, Kortrijk; OFFICEUS, the exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale; and have been residents in The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. They have recently been awarded a Jumex Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo grant to research Islands of Food and Desire in the Caribbean.

In this month’s podcast for Le Monde diplomatique, I interview Eyal Weizman about the article he co-authored with Thomas Keenan, entitled “NGOs are ‘the enemy within'”, which looks at how Israel has stepped up the pressure on human rights organizations and NGOs, particularly in the aftermath of their assault on Gaza at the end of 2008. Eyal Weizman is an architect, originally from Israel now based in London. He is director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Before the interview, he explained to me that the Centre exists at the intersection of human rights, politics and the built environment. He has a particular interest in the way in which architecture is implicated in geopolitical conflicts “and how we can read the history of conflicts through the built environment”. He is the author of Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. Click here to play the podcast.

Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss born in1967, (Subotica) is an architect educated at Harvard University and Belgrade University. He recently collaborated with Herzog & de Meuron architects and is the founder of Normal Architecture Office as well as co-founder of School of Missing Studies, network for cultural and urban research. His recent book „Almost Architecture“, published by Merz&Solitude and kuda.nao explores the roles of architecture vis-à-vis democratic processes, abrupt political changes and architectural appearance of post-communist ideologies. He is an Assistant Professor at Tyler School of Art_Architecture at Temple University and lectures at Harvard GSD and at Penn School of Design. He is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths College, University of London with a dissertation on the positive spatial aspects of Balkanization. He exhibited and lectured about his work at the universities and museums in Western Europe, North America and Japan and he published internationally. Andreas Rumpfhuber is Architect and Researcher with an office in Vienna, Austria. Andreas is member of the Researchers and Artists Collective roundtable.kein.org at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College in London, he was PhD-stipendiate (2005-2008) at the Center for Design Research at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen. His PhD-dissertation „Architecture of Immaterial Labour“ will be published in fall 2010 at TURIA+KANT. Andreas was lecturing and teaching amongst others at TU Vienna, TU Graz, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Goldsmiths College, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, he was curating a.o. „Schindler Lecture“ series (2004-2007) at the Austrian Society of Architecture (www.oegfa.at), the Conference „Politics of Designing“ at The Danish Doctoral Schools of Architecture & Design. He is regularly writing for the Vienna Street-Newspaper Augustin, as well as for divers international Architecture/Art magazines and journals such as: Springerin, Hefte für Gegenwartskunst, dérive, Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung, UmBau, Arkitekten, bauwelt.

Eyal Weizman is an Architect based in London. 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. roundtable.kein.org. 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. CHRISTOPH PLANER IS A STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF INNSBRUCK. WHILE STUDYING ARCHITECTURE HE ALSO WORKED FOR NOX/LARS SPUYBROEK IN ROTTERDAM. HE IS A STUDENT ASISSTANT AT BART LOOTSMAS CHAIR OF ARCHITECTURAL THEORY AND CO PRODUCER OF THE RED CORNER TALKS.