Eyal Weizman
Eyal Weizman MBE FBA is a British Israeli architect. He is the director of the research agency Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London where he is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and a founding director there of the Centre for Research Architecture at the department of Visual Cultures. In 2019 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.
Biography
Eyal Weizman was born in Haifa, Israel. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London, and completed his PhD at the London Consortium.Architecture career
In 2007 he was a founding member of the architectural collective Decolonizing Architecture in Beit Sahour in the West Bank, Palestinian territories. Weizman has been a professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at The Bartlett in London at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. Weizman's most known theoretical work describes the acts of the Israeli army as founded upon the post-structuralist French philosophers and a reading of them. He also conducted research on behalf of B'tselem on the "planning aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank".He has also published many articles on Israeli geography and architecture.
In 2013 he designed a permanent folly in Gwangju, South Korea which was documented in the book The Roundabout Revolution.
In 2010 he established the agency Forensic Architecture, which provide advanced architectural and media evidence to civil society groups, with the help of several European Research Council grants, as well as other human rights grants. Forensic Architecture undertook research for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors without Borders, the Red Cross, and the United Nations.
In 2017, he was a guest speaker at the 17th edition of the Sonic Acts Festival: The Noise of Being. Since 2019 he is a guest professor at ETH Zurich. Between 2014 and 2017 he was a Global Scholar at Princeton University.
In February 2020, Weizman was informed by email that his right to travel to the United States under a visa waiver program had been revoked. He was later informed by an official of the US Embassy in London that an algorithm had identified a security threat that was related to him.
Political activism
Weizman is on the editorial board of Third Text, Humanity, Cabinet and Political Concepts and is a board member of the Centre for Investigative Journalism and of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and sat on the board of the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem in Jerusalem.He is currently on the advisory boards of the Human Rights Project at Bard College in New York, as a jury member for architecture in the Akademie Schloss Solitude and of other academic and cultural institutions.
In 2014 Weizman was featured in "The Architecture of Violence", a film produced for the series Rebel Architecture broadcast by Al Jazeera English.
Weizman has spoken against Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Speaking about the Israeli military targeting of civilians, Weizman said he "can't see it anything other than a part of the genocidal campaign". Work done by Weizman, as part of Forensic Architecture, has countered Israel's defense in South Africa's genocide case against Israel. Summarizing the report's findings, Weizman has said:
Israel's defence at the ICJ relied greatly on it instituting these humanitarian zones, warnings and evacuation orders. And with this, they were trying to argue that actually they are trying to save lives, rather than, as accused, engaging in genocidal acts. In fact, when we looked at the correlation between evacuation orders and where people were actually sent, we saw very often people were sent to areas that had no adequate infrastructure. Furthermore, people were being attacked by the military in these zones.
Weizman has criticized Germany's legal and political framework which criminalizes certain forms of solidarity with Palestine by equating it with antisemitism. Weizman argues that this state-sponsored repression undermines democratic values and restricts the ability to challenge oppressive political systems. He also criticized the German state by arguing that the state imposes a narrow, politicized definition of Jewish identity to serve its own political interests. He said:
Both Emily and I, as Jewish intellectuals in Germany, find ourselves occasionally being deplatformed, being publicly disciplined – being lectured by the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators who murdered our families and who now dare to tell us that we are antisemitic.
Awards and recognition
Weizman was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to architecture.- 2006 James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize from the LSE/London and CCA/Montreal
- 2011 Prince Claus Architecture Prize
- 2016 Schelling Award for Architectural Theory
- 2016 The Digital Dozen 2016 Award for Breakthroughs in Storytelling from Columbia University
- 2017 Finalist, Beazley Design of the Year Award
- 2017 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics
- 2017 Prix Ars Electronica
- 2017 The PeaBody-Facebook, Future of Media Award
- 2017 European Cultural Foundation Princess Margriet Award for Culture
- 2018 nominated for the Turner Prize with Forensic Architecture
- 2019 elected Fellow of the British Academy
- 2020 MBE for services to architecture
- 2021 received the London Design Innovation Medal
Books
- 1998 Random Walk, London: Architectural Association
- 2000 Yellow Rhythms, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers
- 2003 Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, Verso
- 2003 Territories, Builders and Warrior, Rotterdam: Witte de With Press
- 2003 Territories, Camps, Islands and other States of Utopia, Berlin and Cologne: Kunst Werke and Walter Koenig Press
- 2004 Territories, The Frontiers of Utopia and other Facts on the Ground, Cologne: Walther Koenig Press
- 2007 Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, Verso
- 2011 The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, Verso
- 2012 Mengele's Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics, Sternberg Press/Portikus
- 2012 Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums, Hatje Cantz
- 2013 Before and After, Moscow: Strelka Press
- 2014 Architecture After Revolution, Berlin: Sternberg Press
- 2014 FORENSIS, Berlin: Sternberg Press
- 2015 The Roundabout Revolution, Berlin: Sternberg Press
- 2015 The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert, Göttingen: Steidl and Cabinet Books.
- 2017 Hollow Land: The Architecture of Israel's Occupation, Third and updated edition London and NYC: Verso Books
- 2017 Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics, Barcelona and Mexico City: MACBA/MUAC
- 2017 Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, NYC: MIT/Zone Books
- 2021 Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, London: Verso
- 2021 ''The Police Shooting of Mark Duggan: Forensic Architecture Reports, New York: Cabinet books and London: ICA books''
Translations
Hollow Land- 2017 in Arabic, Cairo and Ramallah: Madarat for Research and Publishing
- 2017 in Turkish, Istanbul: Kitap
- 2017 in Hebrew, Tel Aviv: Babel Books
- 2012 in Spanish : A través de los muros, Madrid: Errate naturae editors
- 2011 in Greek, Athens: ΤΟΠOBOPOΣ
- 2009 in German : Durch Wände gehen, Leipzig: Konserve-Verlag
- 2009 in German: Sperrzonen: Israels architektur der besatzung, Hamburg: Edition Nautilus
- 2009 in Italian: Architettura dell'occupazione: spazio politico e controllo territoriale in Palestina e Israele, Milan: Bruno Mondadori
- 2007 in French : A travers les murs, Paris: La Fabrique
- 2016 in Hebrew, Kav Hamidbar, Sav Hasihsuh, Tel Aviv: Babel Books
- 2013 in Italian, Il minore dei mali possibili, Rome: Nottetempo
- 2013 in Croatian, Najmanje od svih mogućih zala, Zagreb: Multimedijalni institute
- 2009 in Italian, Il Male Minore, Rome: Nottetempo
- 2020 in German, Megeles Schädel, Leipzig: Merve
- 2015 in Spanish el cráneo de Mengele, Madrid and Buenos Aires: Sans Soleil Ediciones
- 2014 in Turkish, Mengele'nin Kafatası Adli Estetiğin Ortaya Çıkışı, Istanbul, Açılım Kitap
- 2013 in Hebrew, Hagulgolet Shel Mengele: Lidata shel Haestetika Haforensit, Tel Aviv: Resling Books
- 2013 in Croatian, Mengeleova lubanja: Zaceci forenzicke estetike, Zagreb: Monoskop