The Architecture of Slow, Structural, and Spectacular Violence and the Poetic Testimony of War

Abstract

This research observes the architecture of the lived built environment in Lebanon as a material sensor of risk, produced through an evolving integrated limit condition of conflict and capitalism. Forcing its impact through slow, structural, and spectacular modes of enacting violence, this article traces an historic inscription of these technologies of governance, read through an intersectional observation of international law, architecture, and the human bodily experience of affect. Framing the often chaotic or hysteric nature of voicing evidence as poetic testimony, this article questions dominant methods of producing evidence that often exclude or render the human body invisible.