POSTPONED – new seminar date to be advertised soon
Over the past decade, the Gaza Strip has turned into a virtually sealed-off enclave, and endured four wars. In this presentation, Francesco Sebregondi argues that these recurrent wars can no longer be understood as an abrupt interruption of an otherwise normal state of peace; rather, they describe a peak of intensity in an economy of violence that takes various forms: structural and explosive, fast and slow.
Likewise, the programs of relief and reconstruction that are carried out between two military operations in Gaza also play an important role in maintaining the apparatus of power that war is regularly called on to re-affirm. Focusing on the reconstruction mechanism established in the aftermath of the 2014 Israeli military operation Protective Edge, the presentation unpacks its functioning in order to highlight how it extends the logic of security imposed by and through the blockade – allowing it to bleed into the urban fabric of Gaza.
About the speaker:
Francesco Sebregondi is an architect and a researcher, whose work explores the intersections of violence, technology, and the urban condition. Since 2011 he has been a Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture, Coordinator of the collective project (2013-2015), and co-editor of its main publication “Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth” (Sternberg Press, 2014).He is also the architect of PATTRN, an open-source tool for data-driven, participatory fact-mapping.
Between 2013 and 2015, he taught at the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, on the topic of “architecture and activism” and since 2015, he has been a CHASE-funded doctoral candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London, where his research examines the architecture of the Gaza blockade. He lives and works between Paris and London.
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