Eyal Weizman : FORENSIS: The architecture of public truth
Je signale cette conférence parce que j’admire l’engagement et l’oeuvre d’Eyal Weizman. Et j’espère que sa conférence sera écoutable ou regardable quelque part sur Internet.
Thursday 16 January
APL Annual Lecture
www.youtube.com/user/NewcastleSAPL
Eyal Weizman : FORENSIS: The architecture of public truth
(Curtis Auditorium)
The lecture will present a set of investigations and critical reflections that employ the term forensis to designate a condition by which intensified forms of material and spatial analysis transform the ways political struggles are understood and engaged with.
Forensis is Latin for “pertaining to the forum” and it is the origins of the term forensics; but by returning to the origins in forensis – as the lecture will attempt to demonstrate – seek to depart from the ways in which the term forensics is currently employed - as scientific investigation undertaken in the context of the law.
The intensification of architectural research is central to our project. Architecture is employed as a field of knowledge and as a mode of interpretation, one not only concerned with buildings but rather with an ever-changing set of relations between people and things across multiple scales: from the human body to human induced climate change, from the scale of a single home to the scale of the earth as the ultimate home, that we understood as both a planetary scale architectural construction site and also as a potential ruin. The lecture will move along two trajectories that are both interdependent and contradictory. On the one hand it will present work produced in the context of a “forensic agency” that was established in 2011 at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths under the title “forensic architecture”. This agency was unique in that our members - architects, artists, filmmakers and theorists, rather than scientists and pathologists - undertook the investigations. Within this agency we investigated the actions of corporations and states in relation to violent conflict, military repression, and climate change in Palestine, Equador, Chile, Pakistan, Yemen …the agency follows its own research agenda, and each of our investigations was chosen because of the urgency of the situation and for allowing the research project to demonstrate how methodological innovations in the production of new types of evidence can open up legal process and also the political imagination. We have offered our analysis to civil organizations, NGOs, activist groups, and were even selected to lead the UN special Raporteur for HR’s investigation on Drone warfare presented in the General Assembly in October 2013. We also work with prosecutors who presented in various legal and political forums in different locations worldwide.
On the other hand the lecture will present a historical, theoretical and artistic investigation into forensic practices and this in order to critically evaluate their epistemologies, assumptions, protocols, and politics of knowledge production. In short we both used forensics and critically evaluated the tools with which it is undertaken. This double strategy was necessary because of the fundamental political ambiguity we had towards the practice of forensics. The history of forensics is of course the history of the techniques by which states police individuals. Its span includes the phrenological strategies of the mid 19th century and the digital eavesdropping of yesterday. The courts in which forensics is asked to perform embody of course the logic of the states that established them. But forensis could become a counter hegemonic practice that could invert the relation between individuals and states, helping to challenge state and corporate violence and the tyranny of their truth.
Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Visual Cultures and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2007 he is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. Weizman has been a Professor of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at the Bartlett UCL in London and the Staedel School in Frankfurt. He has lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. His books include Mengele’s Skull (with Thomas Keenan at Sterenberg Press, 2012), Forensic Architecture (dOCUMENTA13 notebook, 2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (Nottetempo 2009, Verso 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003), the series Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books.
Eyal Weizman is a regular contributor and an editorial board member for several journals and magazines including Humanity, Inflexions and Cabinet where he has edited a special issue on forensics (issue 43, 2011). He has worked with a variety of NGOs worldwide and was member of B’Tselem board of directors. He is currently on the advisory boards of the Institue of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, the Human Rights Project at Bard College in New York, and of other academic and cultural institutions. Professor Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-2007, a co-recipient of the 2010 Prince Claus Prize for Architecture (for DAAR) and was invited to deliver the Rusty Bernstein, Paul Hirst, Nelson Mandela, Mansour Armaly and the Edward Said Memorial Lectures amongst others. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium/Birkbeck College.
Anne Fry
Events and Engagement Manager (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays)
School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
Newcastle University
NE1 7RU
+44(0)191 208 5648
Anne.Fry@ncl.ac.uk
www.ncl.ac.uk/apl
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