New Book: Bulldozer Politics – The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Architectural Project | THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE
▻http://thefunambulist.net/2016/04/18/new-book-bulldozer-politics-the-palestinian-ruin-as-an-israeli-archi
The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Architectural Project ///
In his book The Drone Easts with Me: Diaries from a City under Fire, Palestinian author Atef Abu Saif recounts the punctuation of his daily life by the systematic bombings of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli army during the dreadful siege of the 2014 summer that killed 2,220 Palestinians and displaced more than 500,000.[1] Abu Saif describes how he and his relatives could not bring themselves to tell his 19-months old daughter, Jaffa, that the loud noises she was keeping hearing were, in fact, deadly bombs. Instead, they told her that the loud noises she could hear was her big brother Naem slamming the door, hence her scream each time an explosion occurs nearby: “the doooooooor!” In a city under siege, sound becomes the predominant relation to the outside reality. Abu Saif recounts how everyone in Gaza can now make the difference between the noise of a missile launched from a tank, a ship, a drone, an aircraft, or a helicopter. To the noise of the bombs, we need to add the voluntarily terrorizing noise of F16 aircrafts reaching the wall of sound, as well as the continuous droning of the Zannate (drones) and, of course, there is the sound of buildings collapsing, dreadfully crushing the totality of its objects and bodies that they contain.
The 51 days of war undertaken by the Israeli army against Gaza and its inhabitants in July and August 2014 constitute one of the most recent occurrences of a process of ruination of the Palestinian conditions of life that started in the late 1940s. This text is a fragment of a broader research about this historical process of ruination of Palestinian homes understood in a paradoxical constructivist architectural manner. By constructivist, I mean that we should distinguish a precise order behind the chaos of the ruins’ rubbles, an architectural process in which the ruin is understood as the final product of a cautiously design strategy.
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