Tuesday 29 May at 7.00 p.m.at the London Review Bookshop

How is it that military and political intervention came to acquire a new “humanitarian” acceptability and legality in recent years? In his new book, The Least of all Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, Eyal Weizman explores the development of the principle of the “lesser evil”—the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice – in three key transformations of the problem: the defining intervention of Médecins Sans Frontières in mid-1980s Ethiopia; the separation wall in Israel-Palestine; and international and human rights law in Bosnia, Gaza and Iraq.

He’ll be discussing the book with Paul Gilroy, Professor of Social History at the LSE, who has said, “Eyal Weizman’s work has become an indispensable source of both insight and guidance in these difficult times. He understands the evolving dynamics of war and sovereignty better than anyone.”

Eyal Weizman is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, author of Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, and co-editor of A Civilian Occupation.

11 May 2012

£5 / Free to ICA Members

Join architect, scholar and curator Eyal Weizman for this lunchtime talk in which he discusses his approach to politics and philosophy.

A key figure within the study of contemporary humanism and architecture, Weizman’s most recent book, The Least of all Posssible Evils (Verso 2011) investigates the genealogy of human rights, from classical and Christian ethics through to modern political philosophy and contemporary theory.

Weizman is also a founding member of the collective, Decolonising Architecture Art Residency (DAAR) in Bethlehem, and is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London where he directs the Centre for Research Architecture.

Since his PhD at Birkbeck College (in co-operation with London Consortium), Weizman has published numerous articles and books (Hollow Land, Verso 2007; A Civilian Occupation, Verso 2003; Yellow Rythms and the Territories 1,2, and 3 series. In addition to sitting on the board of numerous councils worldwide, he also manages the ‘Forensic Architecture’ project, funded by the European Research Council.

http://www.savageobjects.com/

BOOK

Book Launch

2012 May, 3th – 17:30

Sociedade Martins Sarmento, Guimarães

Presentations by editor Godofredo Pereira and writer Ken Hollings

What is to be gained by arguing that objects speak? What do recent turns to the non-human and to things have in common? And what conflicts are emerging within the apparently consensual removal of the human from the centre of the problem of knowledge? Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in objects, things, and the non-human – a gradual departure from the domination of text, language, and discourse in previous decades, or, as is often said, a move away from the human as the central point of reference for thinking the world. The claim that there is a consensual turn is compounded by the emergence of numerous publications on non-human actors in fields as diverse as archaeology, science studies, anthropology, philosophy, history, art, and architecture; works in which the divide between nature and culture or between humans and non-humans is effaced, where complex assemblages of people and things challenge thought procedures, and where the ground upon which modernity itself was founded becomes the object of contention. However, if we look closely at the different ways in which these topics are being discussed, the image of a uniform turn immediately disappears; we find that recent attempts to emancipate objects are contingent upon and differentiated by the practices in which they emerge. With this in mind, the present book tries for the first time to bring together several different forums in which objects are being discussed anew, suggesting that the conflicts arising from fortuitous encounters between researchers might be more productive than a consensual turn to post-humanism

The book takes as its point of departure two well-worn notions, objects and savages, specifically in reference to a Savage Thought that we provocatively twist upon itself, bringing to light not the thought per se but its object and the resistance this object holds to thought. We invited contributions from very different fields to respond to this provocation – from philosophers, archaeologists and anthropologists, to activists, architects and artists – to focus not only on objects themselves but also on the practices within which they are constituted and the territories they refer to. By framing these discussions within object-research as well as academic discourse – in fields ranging from textual production, legal forums, image migration, state performance, and acoustic exploration – speculation about objects and things also becomes a discussion about conflicting ecologies of thought, thus providing insight into often overlooked pragmatic and political dimensions. Ultimately, our hope is that, by bringing such diverse practices together, new lines of thought can be suggested and spaces for new alliances be forged.

Contributors: Martin Holbraad; Ayesha Hameed; Michael Taussig; Graham Harman; Bjørnar Olsen; João Maria Gusmão; Eyal Weizman; Susan Schuppli; Reza Negarestani; Jonathan Saldanha; Regina de Miguel; Marcello Maggi; Paulo Tavares, Godofredo Pereira.

Edited by Godofredo Pereira

Amorphous and unseen, the influence of this deep state is glimpsed at regular points throughout the film – most clearly surfacing in its reflexive responses to popular protest, and in legislated acts of violence and containment, but also rumbling and reverberating, deeper down, in an eternally recurring call-and-response between rhetorical positions and counter-languages, in which a raised fist, a thrown rock, a crowd surge, an occupation provoke a corresponding reaction in the form of a police charge, a baton attack, a pepper spray, assassinations.

A powerful undertow in the ongoing tide of history, this push and pull of competing forces is deftly illuminated in a vivid montage of newly filmed and archive footage. Collided together, past, present and future trace a continuum, in which the same repetitive patterns are played out. Against a backdrop of momentous, historically resonant demonstrations, an eternal rioter, or ‘riotonaut’, is picked out, as if by a searchlight, ever-present at each and every flashpoint. On a moonscape, confronted with a picket that becomes a riot, an ur-dictator, personification of the ‘Deep State’, blurts stupefying, hot-air abstractions of neo-liberalism.

9 May, 7pm @ http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/cinema/Hackney_Picturehouse/film/Deep_State/

‘Deep State’ is commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. Funded by Arts Council England and London Councils.

http://www.forensic-architecture.org/homepage/fields/investigations/sea

FO provided the spatial analysis that lead to the Council of Europe report on NATO’s responsibility for these deaths in the Mediterranean.

The Council of Europe report whose release was covered very widely in all major papers makes makes several references to FO research.
The Guardian has published our sequence of FO maps in this interactive feature.

FO also appears at Human Rights Watch summary of report. The research team is now completing a large report that will be submitted to NATO the EU and the relevant courts.

“In this absorbing study, Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman show how the politics of human rights was transformed by scientists who treated human remains as a form of photography and photography as a form of human remains. Exposed to all the details of a person’s life like a very sensitive negative, bones were made to speak. Victims and victimizers could now reappear in the lab and take their place in court. The arrival of forensic aesthetics is the arrival of the articulate object. This object that speaks occupies the position of the witness, and in so doing inaugurates a whole new chapter in justice. This fascinating book asks us to reconsider how facts are constructed and opens a new and expanded landscape for thinking.”

– Beatriz Colomina, Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University

“In what ways, Keenan and Weizman ask, can the physical remains of the dead be made to speak? In this lucidly focused text on the exhumation of the historical past, the authors identify a crucial shift in the ongoing work of justice for the victims of state violence and accountability for perpetrators. While avoiding any reductive conclusions, they persuasively insist on the importance of a critical evaluation of how forensic science, with its presumed expertise and ‘objectivity,’ is transforming the nature of evidence.”
– Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University

On the margins of aesthetics, science, and law
Anselm Franke

Forensic aesthetics brings into view the way in which boundaries are currently drawn and stabilized, transgressed and shuttered. In practice, forensics is called upon after the fact: in the aftermath of conflict, crime, and violence, when limits have already been breached, fractured, violated, and are put to the test by ongoing crises that call for resolution. But forensics is not primarily concerned with justice; it is both before justice, as that which establishes the conditions for judgment, and that which happens in place of justice, when agents are no longer accountable. The borderland investigated by forensic aesthetics is one in which the categories of living and dead, subjects and objects, past and present are put into question. It is concerned with the technologies and protocols governing this borderland: its biopolitical containment and expansion, the representation of violence, the (re)construction of historical narrative, or the politics of proof manifest in entertainment and mass media. It is at this frontier that objects are brought to speak.
In this sense, forensics is also a projective practice that constructs languages and spaces of agency. Forensic aesthetics accounts for this blurring of borders—a blurring registered by aesthetics—and also testifies to new sensibilities, describes new territories of action and agency, and critically reflects on the technologies of assessing, calculating, restoring, and redrawing those very boundaries. This book was commissioned to instigate, rather than represent, an exhibition. In this curatorial experiment, Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman were asked to produce a book and Hito Steyerl was asked to respond to their text by creating a series of works. This process constructed a form of research within the margins of science, aesthetics, and law— an entangled set of circumstances from which we can examine these fields anew.

http://www.sternberg-press.com/

http://www.versobooks.com/books/532-the-least-of-all-possible-evils

Reviews:

“Eyal Weizman’s work has become an indispensable source of both insight and guidance in these difficult times. He understands the evolving dynamics of war and sovereignty better than anyone.”
– Paul Gilroy, Professor of Social History, London School of Economics

“This is a wonderful book, written with clarity, precision, and passion. It takes the reader into the heart of contemporary necro-politics and calculations of “lesser evils” by powerful states and their humanitarian accomplices. Deeply learned and informative on every page, this is essential reading for anyone who cares about contemporary conditions of warfare and state-controlled violence; about the spatial practices that reinforce and regulate systemic forms of violence, such as the calculation of minimal requirements for human survival. In the spirit of Doctors Without Borders, Weizman is an architect without borders, at home in political philosophy, military history, just war theory, and the spatial systems of controlled, calculated violence that constitute Israel–Palestine, and much of the world today.”
– W. J. T. Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History, University of Chicago

“Originality, ingenuity, and brilliance do not even begin to do justice to this amazing study, this architectural forensics of battle and human rights as pieced together from the study of the ruin and the terrifying logic of “the lesser evil”. How astonishing to see our new world this new way.”
– Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

Existing at the intersection of architecture, history, and the laws of war, Forensic Architecture refers to an analytical method for reconstructing scenes of violence as they are inscribed within spatial artefacts and in built environments.

It employs new modes of technical visualisation to generate complex knowledge about the spaces and histories of violence; transforming mute architectural products into active material witnesses that can be interrogated within public and legal forums.

KUNSTRAUM, BERNSTEINER
Schiffamtsgasse 11, 1020 Wien

Opening address: Eva Blimlinger
Rector, academy of fine arts vienna

Special feature in the Basement
Crystal Math. Video installation: Sylvia Eckermann, Lyrics: Gerald Nestler

Duration: February 29 – April 14, 2012
Opening hours: Thursday – Saturday, 4–8 pm, March 1 – 3 and March 8 – 10
and by appointment: +43 699 152 48 623 / mail@geraldnestler.net

Events
Sun March 11 – 5 pm : Performance
In cooperation with Europe in Motion and imagetanz/brut Vienna

Sun March 18 – 6 pm : Agency and the politics of financial derivatives and
algorithmic decision-making. A discussion with Elie Ayache, Thomas Feuerstein, Stefano Harney, Karin Knorr Cetina and Gerald Nestler

Sound performance: Szely.

Sat March 14 – 6 pm : Technopolitics und Technofinance
Brian Holmes, Armin Medosch, Gerald Nestler and other members of the research project Technopolitics

www.friendsandart.at
mail@friendsandart.at
www.geraldnestler.net

Animism is a multi-faceted exhibition project that addresses the reevaluation of modernity currently taking place along the lines of Bruno Latour’s “We Have Never Been Modern“. The exhibition’s starting point is the artistic-aesthetic process of animation, best known from cartoons and animation films, and examines its relationship with the categorial definitions and limits of the modern world-view.The attraction of animation, namely, is that it transcends borders: the difference between life and non-life, stasis and movement, the human and the animal, reality and imagination are systematically destabilized by animation.

The Exhibition places these phenomena in the context of the term ‘animism’, which stems from 19th-century ethnology. Animism is generally understood to be a religious practice, which, in contrast to the objectivizing standpoint of modern rationality views objects and nature as living things, which possess different forms of subjectivity. The project asks questions about the borders between objects and subjects, between nature and culture, between the psyche and the material world. The term ‘animism’ becomes that starting point of an inquiry into these borders – not least because they have become more fluid through the global and technological developments of recent years and are therefore being reevaluated. The exhibition, with works by about 30 international artists, creates an Ethnological Museum of Modernity in Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

The accompanying conference (15 – 17 March) brings together a range of theorists and artists who have played an essential role in the revision of the modern view of animism and thus open up new forms of access to our concept of “modernity”. In cooperation with the publishing house diaphanes, the project in Berlin is accompanied by a publication with theoretical texts on the central topic of the exhibition. “Animismus – Revisionen der Moderne”, edited by Irene Albers and Anselm Franke, is the first German-language discussion of central positions in the international debate.

With the artists: Adam Avikainen, Agentur/Agency, Marcel Broodthaers, Didier Demorcy, Walt Disney, Jimmie Durham, León Ferrari, J.J. Grandville, Victor Grippo, Candida Höfer, Tom Holert, Ken Jacobs, Yayoi Kusama, Lars Laumann, Len Lye, Daria Martin, Angela Melitopoulos und Maurizio Lazzarato, Vincent Monnikendam, Istvan Orosz, Roee Rosen, Dierk Schmidt, Erik Steinbrecher, Paulo Tavares, Rosemarie Trockel, Martin Zillinger u.a.Mit den Konferenzteilnehmern: David Abrams, Heike Behrend, Cornelius Borck, Diedrich Diederichsen, Masao Fukushima, Harry Garuba, Hiromi Ito, Esther Leslie, Thomas Macho, Spyros Papapetros, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Erhard Schüttpelz, Isabelle Stengers, Michael Taussig

The project in Berlin is supported by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes.