Back Issue Rising Ambitions, Expanding Terrain Number 21, Fall 2004/Winter 2005

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Book Reviews

Reviewed by Keller Easterling

Territories

Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia

Edited by Anselm Franke with Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman

Koln, Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Konig, 2003

PLANNING WEAPONRY
Territories: Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia is one of a series of publications from Kunst-Werke (KW) gallery in Berlin about the politics of space. It documents art works from an exhibition of the same title; it also compiles additional work by critics, architects, artists, and filmmakers. In the wake of documenta X and XI exhibitions of contemporary art in Kassel, Germany, books like these are evidence of recent collaborations that look for continued or enhanced political impact. More than installation art bounded by the gallery, these works are positioned on the front lines of global conflict.

We are accustomed to thinking of architecture as an agent of the market, operating, not in battle, but in the mopping up stages of global conflict. Yet these projects look at architecture as itself a form of weaponry. Certainly terrorism around the world has targeted it as a kind of adversary. Yet, it too can possess a protocol of violence, and it is capable of storing or releasing this violence in its inception, planning, execution, or occupation. The Territories projects respond to Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, the Israeli-Palestinian border, military bases, and archipelagoes of land-grab developments on the West Bank. Working with aerial photography, satellites, and the evidence collected by human rights organizations, they deploy some of the tools found on the front lines. There are those in some micro-salons of architecture culture who believe that critical thinking might induce a distancing paralysis from the wide world. (This discourse flies under the flag of “post-criticality.” The label is not, strictly speaking, an oxymoron. Neither is it a category mistake. A new term would have to be coined to accurately describe its impossibility.) Yet for this network of global practitioners, the challenges of critical theory, in dialogue with the wide world, forge techniques that are embedded in spaces of real political consequence.

The centerpiece and provocation of this particular constellation of works is a project by two Israeli architects: Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal.(1) B'Tselem, a human rights organization that has been tracking demolitions of Palestinian homes as well as the build-up of Israeli settlements, joined forces with Weizman and Segal. Together they have developed a specialized cartography to map Israel's techniques of land acquisition. One cartographic series compiles the continuous contradictory agreements and aggressions that have created a dizzying set of overlapping planimetric borders in the West Bank. Most of these have resulted in isolated enclaves between contested areas. The special cartography also takes a closer look at what first appear to be North American suburban development patterns, the cul-de-sacs of Radburn or a million golf developments around the world. But on the West Bank, these banal instruments develop another aggressive repertoire. They are trained to creep, encircle, and cut off nearby Palestinian territory. They favor linear extensions in the land that create walls or fortifications of Israeli territory, but they also favor isolated points, usually on mountaintops. As a consequence of these and other factors, the cartography must account for the vertical axis. It must stratify what Weizman and Segal call the “flat discourse” of geopolitics to map the conquest of sectional space as well. A vertical cartography maps highway overpasses, water aqueducts, and sewage infrastructure connecting the isolated islands. It also maps a scenographic command over the land that naturally results from the occupation of high elevations and maps the land grabs that sometimes masquerade as archeological claims to sacred sites. Moreover, extending the vertical axis from this below ground space to the space of orbiting satellites, one finds additional claims to the microwave space of telephony and media broadcasting, making even the airspace Israeli-controlled.

Segal and Weizman's work was to have been Israel's contribution to the UIA World Congress of Architecture in 2002 in Berlin. Their study compiled, for the first time, a graphic and comprehensive research that could not conceal evidence of planning as human rights abuse. The Israel Association of Architects cancelled the presentation under its original auspices. Exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York in the spring of 2003, as well as articles in Metropolis and Cabinet that same year, coincided with the Berlin Territories show, now traveling around the world. At the threshold of the KW exhibition, a video of the study's debut in Israel recorded a stunned architectural community unwilling to accept statements like the following by Weizman and Segal:

Palestinian human and political rights are violated not only by the presence of the settlements, but also by their location, size, form, and internal layout—in short by their very design. Just like the tank, the gun, and the bulldozer, here building materials and infrastructure are used as weapons to commit crimes. Planning in the West Bank finally shed the last shred of its social pretense of facilitating the welfare of an abstract “public” and ended up as the executive arm of the strategic and geopolitical agenda of the Israeli state.(2)

Another contributing architect in the KW show, Stefano Boeri, is a founding member of a group of seventy artists, architects, filmmakers, and scientists called Multiplicity. One of their strategic mapping projects, U.S.E.: Uncertain States of Europe looks at shifting economic and cultural boundaries in Europe.(3) Another ongoing project, “Liquid Europe, Solid Sea,” maps both those ecumenical moves that seem to make the continent more fluid and the migrations of labor and striations of security that seem to thicken the Mediterranean into a solid. Whatever the importance of immaterial global networks that operate without respect to location, for Multiplicity, this fluid space coexists with the “irreducible specificity of local spaces” (52).

Most contemporary anthropological work is more interested in the way the local is an affected composition of exported and imported ingredients. Nevertheless, the Israeli-Palestinian territories are among those entrenched spaces that have allowed their imagination only to circle and worry issues of turf. Place there is the only attribute space has ever had. Boeri's technique, what he calls “sampling,” favors filmmaking techniques over cartography for excerpting experiences and practices that possess aggressive power. His experiential atlas of the Israeli-Palestinian boundary films the trips of Palestinian cab drivers who have learned to navigate a complex, thick, and ever-changing line. The Israeli side of the border is relatively smooth and traffic-engineered, while the Palestinian side is slow and largely unknowable, given changing roadblocks and control points.

The camp and the military base join the Territories collection as additional sites of spatial control and terror. Georgio Agamben's analysis of the concentration camp haunts this set of contributions. In Homo Sacer: Sovereignty, Power and Bare Life,(4) Agamben treats the concentration camp as spatial evidence of the moment nations declare a state of emergency.(5) In that emergency, nations abandon the rule of law and enter into an exceptional situation in which they are capable of reducing a citizen's presence to “bare life.” The concentration camp is concrete evidence of this lawlessness and absolute power. Agamben does not confine himself to World War II camps but extends the principle to assess the United States and its willingness to erode the law in a post-September 11 state of emergency—the U.S. Patriot Act and the suspension of global compacts concerning prisoners of war provide amble evidence. America has declared that the detainees are not legally prisoners of war but that they exist in another exceptional state as on-going combatants. The camps are, significantly, removed from the public eye. Outsourcing interrogation avoids questions about coercive treatment that the U.S. ostensibly prohibits. Among those sharing in this discussion in Territories is An Architektur, a Berlin-based journal that uses each issue to link various players in an urban intervention. For An Architektur, the United States is in the crosshairs. Their photography, research, and mappings target Camp X-Ray at the U.S. Navel Base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, a detention camp at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, and the once-secret U.S./U.K. Diego Garcia communications base in the Indian Ocean.

Another contribution, “Temporary Occupation,” follows a similar vein of research. American, Berlin-based Sean Snyder photographs and researches U.S. military bases around the world. The typical programmatic ingredients of these bases include Baskin Robbins, Burger King, Taco Bell, Popeye's Chicken, and a golf course. These familiar ingredients only help to fill any holes in the base's total urban package, usually a compound simulating the American suburban enclave. Synder tracks these bases all over the world from Vicenza to Yokota. Wherever they are, they usually look like military installations have looked for centuries. As many of the bases in America and elsewhere are replaced or decommissioned, they easily transition to assume a new identity as one of the world's many species of enclaves that also look alike. Very little change is needed, since the ingredients are largely the same. A golf club, office park, special economic zone, or residential enclave may even have representatives from the same phylum of franchises. Underlining this similarity, Synder included in his series on global military bases “Shanghai Links,” a mock-American community of golf villas. With snide reference to the term used for colonial partitions of Shanghai, the development is nicknamed the “American concession.” Not an inconsistency or an orphan that sometimes appears in group shows, this example makes a crucial association between camps, bases, and any other enclaves that seek security and legal immunity from municipal governance, taxes, and/or labor restrictions.

"We are accustomed to thinking of architecture as an agent of the market, operating, not in battle, but in the mopping-up stages of global conflict. Yet these projects look at architecture as itself a form of weaponry."

Interspersed between each set of projects, documents, or mappings are over a dozen historical and critical writings. Some are by the artists themselves. Some comment on the works or provide historical reference. The network they outline circulates between New York and Tel Aviv, between recent documenta exhibitions and between a number of galleries and schools in Europe and New York. Most of the contributors pursue interdisciplinary practices common to both art and architecture. They may publish essays, films, or collections of photography. As important as any one issue raised by the book is the presence of the book itself. This kind of synthetic gathering generates a culture of persuasion and resistance. It represents an urban knowledge that has made selected cities in Europe and North America into something of an extra-national network acting as the conscience for an international coalition.

Architects puzzling over which data set best liberates them from critical thinking would probably also wish to be liberated from the evidence found in this book. Hoping, in the worst case, to be accused only of banality, architects claim to work on the standard stuff of spatial products, not the extreme spaces of war. Of these things, the discipline is innocent. Yet the cartography and sampling included in Territories—the aerial photographs of cul-de-sacs, enclaves, and borders—is eerily similar to our own familiar real estate cocktails with their devices for security and territorial conquest. Moreover, were it not for the lens of critical thinking, inflecting the terms of the military and legal space within which we all live, this evidence would remain invisible. It would not constitute information. This work is not stymied by, but rather propelled by and sanctioned by criticality, as it exposes spaces of violence and power. Theaters of development, like military theaters, possess similar aggressions and collusions. As a publication and a network of practitioners, Territories reveals not only an architecture of warfare, but a warfare of architecture.

NOTES

1. They edited A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (New York: Verso, 2003).
2. Eyal Weizman, “The Politics of Verticality: The West Bank as an Architectural Construction” in Territories, 98.
3. Bordeaux: Arc en rêve centre d'architecture: 2000; Milan: Skira, 2002.
4. Homo Sacer: Sovereignty, Power and Bare Life, Daniel Heller-Roazen, trans. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).