[This is the show that was supposed to open at a Berlin exposition in the Fall, but was cancelled when the Israeli Architecture Association withdrew and pulped all the catalogs. Now they've secured a place to put it up in New York and it's having its premiere on Thursday.]
[Doug did an interview with Eyal Weizman that's in the radio archives]
A Civilian Occupation The Politics of Israeli Architecture Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman
February 12 - March 30, 2003 Opening reception: February 12, 7-9 p.m.
Storefront for Art and Architecture 97 Kenmare Street New York, NY 10012 t. 212.431.5795 e. info at storefrontnews.org
National conflicts are characterized not only by the rapid processes of eruptive transformations, but also by the slow duration of building and the lengthy bureaucratic mechanisms of planning. Together these form the scale at which territorial conflicts are played out. Throughout the last century, a different kind of warfare has been radically transforming the landscapes of Israel and Palestine. In it, the mundane elements of planning and architecture have been conscripted as tactical tools in the Israeli state strategy, seeking national and geo-political objectives in the organization of space. The relationship between the landscape and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is symbiotic. The terrain dictates the nature, intensity and focal points of confrontation; while the conflict itself is manifested most clearly in the processes of transformation, adaptation, construction and obliteration of the landscape and the built environment. The landscape becomes the battlefield in which power and state control confront subversive and direct resistance. In an environment where architecture and planning are systematically instrumentalized as the executive arms of the Israeli State, planning decisions do not often follow criteria of economic sustainability, ecology or efficiency of services; rather, they are employed to serve strategic and political agendas. Space becomes the physical embodiment of a matrix of forces, manifested across the landscape in the construction of roads, hilltop settlements, development towns and garden-suburbs.
A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, was originally commissioned by the Israel Association of United Architects (IAUA) for the International Union of Architects Congress in Berlin in July 2002. Upon completion of the exhibition catalog, the IAUA withdrew their support of the project, canceled the exhibition and banned the catalog. Bringing together investigations by Israeli architects, scholars, photographers and journalists addressing the political role of architecture and planning in Israel, this project supplements prevalent historical and political analysis of the conflict with a detailed description of its physical transformations. Architecture is presented as a political issue the material product of politics itself illustrating the spatial dimension of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The exhibition at Storefront is the first public presentation of this work.