On landscapes, ruins, and patterns of remembering
Kinetic Painting with Samia Halaby, in collaboration with Amir ElSaffar
III. Speculative Futures and Fabricated Memories: Maha Maamoun, Larissa Sansour, and Neïl Beloufa
Mabel O. Wilson, “On the Violence of Architecture”
It is also true that photography itself is an encounter with the fact that things are not what they appear. That they are in fact appearances. Eyes traveling through this occupation need to adapt to yet another kind of light. One with enough strength to expose and then decode the symbols of settler-colonialism that order one’s field of view: prickly pears growing over shattered limestone, expatriated palms and pines, color-coded rooftop water tanks, rose-red corrugated roofs, multibillion-dollar separation barriers, demolition rubble, expansive checkpoints, and bypass roads around shrinking enclaves of Palestinian-only areas. In other words, the ability to read the signs is part and parcel of decolonizing vision. So too is understanding the original fabric of historic Palestine so as to read through the layers of what has been erased and replaced against what has been appropriated.
A conversation with Forensic Architecture’s Eyal Weizman