Decolonizing Architecture

Abstract

Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman founded an architectural collective in Bethlehem. Decolonizing Architecture is a master plan that explores the problems and potentiality associated with the reuse of Israeli colonial architecture after the ending of Israeli occupation and settlers evacuations.

The project in which we are currently involved could be seen as an attempt to subvert the way control and security devices work. It’s about the reutilization and re-inhabitation of Israeli colonial architecture from the moment its connection with the political-military regime that keeps it alive ceases to exist. The idea is to establish a counter-laboratory of decolonization. We still insist on the use of this old-fashion term decolonization, aware of its problematic history, in order to designate a form of action that is part of a process that operates on many scales and keeps distance from the existing “solution oriented politics” of the “peace industry”. Decolonization allows us to designate a process aimed at the deactivation of control and security devices. Do you think that this notion of decolonization, in the sense we have articulated it, could be thought as a form of ‘profanation’?” Excerpt from the Book of Profanation 2009 in the same series as the Book of Returns.