Eyal Weizman Research Articles

A Forensic Approach to Seeing Slow Violence in Death Alley

This paper takes, as provocation, Robert Nixon’s proposition that the effects of ecological instances of “slow violence”—that is, brutalities that manifest incrementally across time and space—elude visible registers, and, as a corollary, are rendered image-weak in the context of today’s saturated mediascape. Specifically, through drawing on burgeoning scholarship focusing on the representation of slow violence and its resistance, in conjunction with nascent theory on “mediated forensics” and “militant evidence,” this article positions the devastating manifestations of slow violence in relation to other forms of neocolonial brutality which, it is argued, are likewise systematically structured to impact marginalized communities whose perspectives are persistently underrepresented in the mainstream. Proceeding from this conviction, the representational challenges issued by Nixon over a decade ago are taken up afresh: Eyal Weizman’s calls to explore the rhetorical potentials of the forensic are addressed through an examination of how the emergence of new digital technologies of image production and distribution are reshaping the ways in which ecological activism is practiced in contexts of crises that adhere, at least on first sight, to Nixon’s definition of slow violence. Analysis is foregrounded in the case study of “Death Alley” (once known as “Cancer Alley”), an eighty-five-mile stretch of land which, snaking alongside the Mississippi River in Louisiana, is currently populated by the densest constellation of chemical facilities in the Western Hemisphere, leading it to become the subject of Forensic Architecture’s 2021 investigation Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana.

Network activism: grassroots responses to the consequences of the dynamic proliferation of information and media coverage of global crises

This article aims to characterize grassroots activities in an era of increasingly rapid spread of information and mediatization of conflicts and global disasters. In the current environment, dubbed dense mediaenvironment by Eyal Weizman, new opportunities are being created to build forms of public engagement. Their development is particularly influenced by such phenomena as OSINT, aspects of which are described in the article. The grassroots activities described detail the research methodologies used, based on data and open sources. The contexts of Fortress Europe are also presented, and an analysis is made of the circumstances that resulted in the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border. The following part of the article describes the background of the creation and operation of the wallobserver.eu online platform. It focuses on the problem of archiving media articles leading the narrative around migration situations happening on the external land borders of the European Union and the process of its fortification.

“Politics in Matter”: Concrete Expressions in Contemporary Palestinian Art of Resistance

This article examines the utilization of concrete as a medium for artistic expression in the art produced by contemporary Palestinian artists residing in the State of Israel. The author proposes that when considered through Eyal Weizman’s lens of "politics in matter," concrete emerges in contemporary Palestinian art as a significant material intersecting with the broader political fabric, an artistic medium intricately linked to the ongoing struggle for Palestinian identity, nationalism, and human rights. Within the geopolitical context of Israel/Palestine, concrete thus gives rise to multifaceted associations of struggle, violence, defense, and fear. Contemporary Palestinian artists actively engage with concrete, repurposing it as a tool for artistic, civic, and political resistance. They challenge dominant narratives, contest prevailing historical accounts, and confront oppressive structures. Their works reimagine shared spaces, contest the erasure of Palestinian history, and amplify marginalized voices. Concrete becomes a material embodiment of the complexities experienced by Palestinian artists residing and working within the State of Israel, its finally symbolizing resistance and catalyzing the reimagining of alternative futures. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of how concrete is employed and represented within contemporary Palestinian artistic practices, shedding light on its role in shaping Palestinian experiences and contributing to a nuanced understanding of the Palestinian/Israeli context. By exploring the politics of concrete, the article enhances our understanding of its significance in contemporary Palestinian art and its place in the broader discourse of art history.

Deepfakes and the promise of algorithmic detectability

Deepfakes, as a sociocultural and technical phenomenon, have engendered two distinct yet intimately interwoven set of responses: on one hand, they have created widespread anxieties concerning the potential and harmful impact of deepfakes. On the other hand, they have also given rise to a new regime of detection: tools, models, and methods that are developed and used to detect whether something is a deepfake or not. However, the ways in which machine learning algorithms are being framed as the solution to the problem of deepfake detection have not received sufficient critical attention. Drawing on the 2019 Deepfake Detection Challenge organised by Meta as well as finding resonances in the work of Eyal Weizman, this article seeks to problematise and unsettle what I call the promise of algorithmic detectability. That is, the claim that machine learning algorithms render the issue of deepfake detection knowable, tractable, and resolvable. Examining the themes of training data, thresholds, and certainty, I emphasise the inherent difficulties, intractabilities and contingencies of deepfake detection models. Ultimately, I argue that the promise of algorithmic detectability falls short and that the ethico-politics of deepfakes cannot be reduced solely to a framework of detection algorithms.

Telemetric Feeling in Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett’s The Ring of Fire (2014–Present)

Abstract: This essay traces recent and ongoing works and projects of the artist duo Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett, alongside the etymological history of the science of telemetry. Focusing on three works ( Ziarah Utara , 2018–present; Iron Placenta , 2021; and The Call of Fragility , 2022), in this essay I contend that the duo’s The Ring of Fire (2014–present) meta-project marks the “telemetric turn” in their practice, wherein the use of open-source satellite data and augmented embodiment have become increasingly frequent methods and motifs in their work. Analysing this turn in Salina and Ahmett’s practice in relation to Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman’s notion of “investigative aesthetics” and McKenzie Wark’s three-part framework of technics, ethnography, and aesthetics, the essay discusses how documentary and performance, storytelling and investigation, remote sensing and lived realities, come together in Salina and Ahmett’s work to offer a possible theorisation of a new telemetric function and artistic method: telemetric feeling.

Critical Proximity

The architecture curriculum is usually divided into studio courses and lecture or seminar courses where design and research, respectively, are separately pursued. Although the curriculum is designed to unite the approaches of design, the humanities, and the sciences that together comprise the architectural endeavor, in practice these epistemological forms of inquiry are divided into separate courses and rarely allowed to crossover into one another. Two structures common to architecture programs avoid these divisions: the community design center and the research studio. The first unifies design with community engagement and exposure to the real-world issues of marginalized communities, while the second incorporates humanities-based research into the studio. In this paper, we will present the work of a three course-sequence recently taught at Miami University as a “Humanities Lab” that pursued methodological promiscuity by mixing community-based research and design. In so doing, we jettisoned the expertise traditionally claimed by architecture to create a more inclusive practice–inclusive of community members and their expertise and centering the experiences and histories of marginalized people instead of buildings. We do so by engaging in what Eyal Weizman has called “critical proximity,” in which the distanciated position of the researcher is jettisoned in favor of working alongside and for marginalized communities. Over the course of three semesters, we explored the impact of critical proximity in three different endeavors–a seminar, research studio, and exhibition design–and discovered inclusive pedagogical strategies: thickness, research-in-community, and decentered production. Together, these strategies allowed us to refigure the role of the architect as a researcher aligned with community interests.

Introduction toVisual Arts ResearchSpecial Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Introduction to<i>Visual Arts Research</i>Special Issue, Body Cam: The Visual Regimes of Policing

Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, Investigative Aesthetics: Conflict and Commons in the Politics of Truth, reviewed by Ghalya Saadawi

Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman, <i>Investigative Aesthetics: Conflict and Commons in the Politics of Truth</i>, reviewed by Ghalya Saadawi

Thirty Years with Mark Cousins

Critical QuarterlyVolume 64, Issue 1 p. 33-34 Original Article Thirty Years with Mark Cousins Eyal Weizman, Corresponding Author Eyal Weizman ew@forensic-architecture.org Search for more papers by this author Eyal Weizman, Corresponding Author Eyal Weizman ew@forensic-architecture.org Search for more papers by this author First published: 03 April 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12659Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume64, Issue1April 2022Pages 33-34 RelatedInformation

Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman (2021)

Review of: Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman (2021) London: Verso, 272 pp., ISBN 978-1-78873-908-5, p/bk, £14.99

The promises, poetics and politics of verticality in the really high African city

This article is an attempt to foreground considerations in African cities of three-dimensional urbanism, or what Eyal Weizman has called the ‘politics of verticality’. Through analysis of the work of three builder/artists the article resists a strain of persistent horizontality in African urban studies. The focus of this article is on three specific urban forms which are contested in interesting and provocative ways. The first, the Tower, in Limete Kinshasa is simultaneously a built form, an imagined space, a set of processes, a film and a theoretical proposition for Filip de Boeck and Sammy Baloji. The second structure is a radical reimagining of Bodys Isek Kingelez’s childhood agricultural village as a megacity of cardboard skyscrapers, paper parks and polystyrene promenades. Kimbembele Ihunga (1994) is a three-by-two-meter ‘extreme maquette’ in which Kingelez presents an unbuildable city which is nevertheless intended in all seriousness as a visionary proposal for post-independence African urbanism. The third structure is a literary residential high-rise, the Maianga Building in Luanda. Ondjaki’s novel, Transparent City (2018) presents the biography of a building in a general state of decay but which is, counterintuitively, not a burden to its residents; in fact, its idiosyncratic dysfunction offers some promising, pleasant and useful affordances.

Epilogue: Theory, Momentarily

Epilogue:Theory, Momentarily Eyal Weizman (bio) and Daniela Gandorfer (bio) 14 Years. Theory Daniela Gandorfer: I am delighted to have the opportunity to speak with you—first in London and once again digitally, given current conditions—about modes and ethics of theory as matterphorical endeavors. Now, five years on from first working with and learning from you in the Conflict Shorelines seminars at Princeton University, I can share that it shaped a lot of what lies behind matterphorical, namely a refusal to practice research and analysis detached from the physical world—and thereby detached also from the political, legal, social, and historical entanglements that create the conditions to that which we critically attend to in our analysis. It also provided a continued opportunity for researchers to practice and imagine a different kind of ethical and political commitment, one that is not simply about the question of the right kind of theory, but about a practice of doing theory, of making sense, with the material (and always also political) world. I want to start with a question about "Lethal Theory," an essay you published in 2006 and which has remained an important piece in thinking about the often-assumed separation between theory and practice.1 Coming from your own field, architecture, which might be dispositionally closer to practice(s) and the physical (and built) world, you challenge the assumption of pure theory, meaning something residing only in academic texts, having an impact, if at all, in university contexts. In fact, it is precisely the often even lethal impact (literally, pushing or striking against) that your essay attends to, most concretely the IDF's tactic of "walking through walls" and other forms of urban warfare developed by Israeli military strategists engaging with critical theories.2 You argue that while you are not comparing the use of critical theory in architecture with its application by the Israeli military, "a close examination of the latter certainly reflects on the former, insofar as it illustrates a more general problem of the relationship between theory and practice."3 The essay demonstrates the importance of thinking theory and practice together and foreshadows the mode of investigative theory that you, and eventually Forensic Architecture, are doing today. Can you speak about the notion of "theory" in the essay's title, and, in regard to writing theory, also the challenges and complicities the essay exposed? [End Page 399] Eyal Weizman: In "Lethal Theory" the problem is not with theory. The problem was "how could theory be involved in an anti-colonial struggle?" What is theory in operation, in resistance to any form of hegemonic control and domination? Now I'm not going to speak so much about what was said therein but about the controversy that erupted. The interesting thing about that was when this essay was sent to be published in Hebrew, in what was probably the most critical journal at the time, Theory & Criticism, and which still exists, the editors were worried. Rather than publishing the essay, they sent it to the military to be looked at first. So, this started a big controversy: How can the one critical journal in the country send an article to the military and give the military, which already has anyway access to all the communication channels, a voice in the journal. The military noted three problems, some factual issues with the essay; it was not about the theory, it was about numbers, and whether the electricity was cut or not, etc. The journal then suggested that I change these things according to the military's remarks and they go forward with the publishing. I declined and responded: "Well, I am not taking any orders from the Israeli Military, thank you very much." What followed in the editorial board then was a big discussion about writing theory in conflict. Structural conditions were ok to mention, but without the mentioning of names, people, events, even without mentioning the incident. It pointed to one obvious issue: there was no journalism. In that moment I understood that, for me, resistance requires theory and event. DG: Looking at the essay now, what has happened and changed since then in terms of the struggle you describe...

Interrogar la evidencia arquitectónica: la exposición de Eyal Weizman y Rafi Segal para la Asociación Israelí de Arquitectos Unidos

&lt;p class="p1"&gt;En 2002, Eyal Weizman y Rafi Segal organizaron una exposición para la Asociación Israelí de Arquitectos Unidos. Antes de su inauguración, la exposición fue cancelada y sus 5,000 catálogos impresos fueron destruidos. Los curadores querían exhibir evidencia de la complicidad de los arquitectos israelíes con violaciones a los derechos humanos y las leyes internacionales durante la ocupación de Cisjordania. En este contexto, el presente artículo se pregunta en primer lugar cuál es la diferencia entre exhibir arquitectura en un museo y exhibir evidencias en un contexto legal. En segundo lugar, compara las estrategias de mostrar la arquitectura en esta exposición con las exposiciones mundiales del siglo XIX y los edificios panorama.&lt;/p&gt;

Review: Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, by Eyal Weizman

Review: <i>Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability</i>, by Eyal Weizman

States of play: evaluating the renaissance in US military wargaming

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the topic of military wargaming into current critical debates in International Relations (IR) on games and gaming, which to date have focused on civilian, recreational forms. Identifying a renaissance which began in the US in 2014, the core argument developed is that wargaming utilizes key elements of critical/postpositivist theory in its interventions into the ‘human training dimension’ with the aim of impacting upon the inner domain of players in promotion of military ends. Drawing on Eyal Weizman’s work, the paper makes two key claims: 1) Wargaming poses a profound methodological and epistemological challenge to the quantitatively-oriented Operations Research (OR) community which has dominated DoD analysis for nearly a century. 2) By decoupling critical/postpositivist traditions from their intended ends, using them instead to impact upon players, wargaming militarizes them. The paper begins by locating the origins of the wargaming renaissance in the Defence Innovation Initiative and associated Third Offset Strategy. It then shows how US military gaming intervenes at the level of the human training dimension by cultivating specific forms of critical thinking, multiple futures planning, and reflexive decision-making using distinctively critical/postpositivist insights. From there it sets out three key challenges posed by wargaming to OR which trouble the latter’s claims to prediction, objectivity, and rationalism, before concluding that a new form of ‘post-quantitative defence analysis’ is emergent which militarizes the tools of critical/postpositivist approaches.

Erasing, Obfuscating and Teasing out from the Shadows

Three practice-based investigations discussed in this essay—Razing Manzanar II, States of Exception, and Palimpsest—correlate two seemingly separate conditions of invisibility. One is invisibility produced through the making and unmaking of spaces of internment or detention called forth through governmental utterances. The other is hidden labour, specifically related to architecture and built environments. These performance-installations reflect upon government-mandated, and now-demolished, camps and the labour occurring there. The sites of study include World War II-era Japanese American internment camps in the American West, where interned citizens wove camouflage for the US Army, and the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV) in Paris used to detain French Algerian labourers during their war of independence. Most traces of the Japanese American camps are now invisible—razed long ago—but are acknowledged by government. The camps situated within the Paris city limits are also invisible, but not simply by erasure; they are obfuscated by government obstacles to locating them, with the CIV’s whereabouts, the city’s largest intentional camp, remaining elusive. While seeking to render sensible, or knowable through the senses, these internment camps, and the camp as a recurrent condition, my practices of installation and performing spatial labour also explore rendering visible otherwise-invisible labour. My labour is architectural, employing the discipline’s instruments, such as drawings and models. These labours take cues from Eyal Weizman’s Forensic Architecture (2017) and age-old techniques of descriptive geometry and shadow projection. Juxtaposing these concerns problematizes both the now-razed architectures that once disappeared whole populations and (hyper/in)visibility (Kunst 2015) of spatial labour. Performed and installed spatial labours of erasing, obfuscating and teasing out of the shadows are the three modes of rendering the invisible visible I examine in this essay, arguing that the performative nature of the explorations is critical to rendering sensible what the artefacts normally conceal.

Architecture as event space: Violence, securitisation, and resistance

AbstractCentral to the conception of this article is the architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi's dictum, ‘There is no architecture without action, no architecture without events, no architecture without program … no architecture without violence.’ Shaped as well by Eyal Weizman's conception of ‘forensic architecture’, the focus of the investigation is on Israel's architecture of security and on the corresponding Palestinian architecture of resistance. Emphasising an encounter of cartographies that reveals the way Palestinians make life livable in response to the architectural violence they face, the analysis continues with reference to Yari Sharif's analysis of architectures of resistance and with a reading of a feature film, Hany Abu-Assad'sOmar(2013) in which the Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine is one of the film's primary agent/protagonists. The article surveys popular culture texts, focused on crime and espionage to analyse a range of security practices and breaches that amplify the analysis with attention to security issues in individual households, multiple-person dwelling arrangements, architectural locations throughout cities, and buildings housing governmental security agencies. That trajectory of architectural sites lends a micropolitical analysis to the macropolitical level of governmental policy and modes of resistance to it.

Review Article: Targeted Killing, Technologies of Violence, and Society

This article addresses the interaction between policies of targeted killing and wider social forces, particularly technology, through three recently published books. I suggest that while Ian Shaw’s Predator Empire does well to draw attention to the enclosing tendency of contemporary nonhuman environments and means of technological control – particularly drones, Kyle Grayson’s Cultural Politics of Targeted Killing provides a necessary contextualisation of these technological transformations by emphasising the cultural-political underpinnings of policies of targeted killing and of the assemblage of technologies into such policies. These perspectives are replicated in Eyal Weizman’s Hollow Land, which describes the political and strategic manipulation of space to implement Israeli nonterritorial occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. I conclude by suggesting that these three works provide renewed avenues to reflect on the normative and conceptual impacts of lethal drones and other novel warfighting technologies, as well as on the relation between state violence and normalcy.

Humanitarian violence: how Western airmen kill and let die in order to make live

ABSTRACTA number of Western countries such as the United States, Britain and France have been waging war continuously since the ‘terrorist’ attacks of 11 September 2001. Although these wars have resulted in a massive loss of life, only a few scholars have tried to understand the determinants and motives behind this violence. This article aims to shed some light on this blind spot by studying the interpretive ‘frames’ (Judith Butler) that mediate the Western military’s relation to violence. It does so by relying on a qualitative inquiry with the French airmen who bombed Afghanistan (2001–2011), Libya (2011) and Mali (2013). The article argues that the classical explanation in terms of ‘de-humanization’ is only partially heuristic. Indeed, airmen sometimes see the human ‘face’ – in Levinas’ term – of the people they kill, and these moments of ‘recognition’ do not alter their will to wage war and drop bombs. I explain this apparent paradox by relying on Eyal Weizman’s notion of ‘humanitarian violence’.

Book Review: Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability

Book Review: Eyal Weizman, <i>Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability</i>