Bartlett Think-Tank

Al Bayyadah is a town in Cyrenaica that was founded in 1938 and originally called D’Annunzio, after the famous Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. These agricultural settlements were built around an architectural core formed by a church, an administrative building, and a section of the Fascist party, which functioned as space for events and public gatherings: “God, Fatherland and Family”. The image is taken from a publication called “The Twenty Thousand. Photographic Documentary of the First Mass Colonial Migration in the frame of the Intensive Demographic Colonisation Plan”: I Ventimila. Documentario fotografico della 1. Migrazione in massa di coloni in Libia per il piano di colonizzazione demografica intensiva (Tripoli: Maggi, 1938).

Art historian Elisabetta Longari on Domus decries the damage that the Italian colonial architecture in Libya suffered through the Allied bombings in the Second World War and the erratic post-colonialist fury of the dictator. I had once the chance of viewing the videos Lorenzo Pezzani shot during the first stages of his research in the after-lives of colonial buildings in Libya. It is surprising how much has been left behind, most interestingly the colonial settlements, which in their structure are surprisingly similar to the West Bank settlements of today. It is true, as Longari says, that what is still standing survived “simply because there was no will to destroy it”. She adds that true conservation of the built heritage also means “renovate, reinterpretate, rehabilitate” and calls on the Italian government and other Italian institutions to intervene to save this wealth of heritage. This is a delicate task, not only because of the risk to reiterate colonial attitudes to space, but especially because to this day an atlas of the afterlives of this as other colonial architecture is still lacking.

Alessandro Petti of Decolonizing Architecture proposed that three general approaches can be discerned in dealing with evacuated colonial architecture: destruction, re-occupation, and subversion. Destruction is often based on the desire to turn time backwards, reverse development into virgin nature, or into a tabula rasa on which all potential forms of development and land use would be possible. This is a very appealing approach, particularly given the abhorrence aroused by colonial development, although demolitions or even the forced ruralization of built-up areas may sometimes create further planning problems or environmental damage. Another strong temptation present throughout the histories of decolonization was re-occupation of colonial buildings and infrastructure and reuse them in the very same way they were used under colonial regimes. Such repossessions tended to reproduce some of the colonial power relations in space: colonial villas were inhabited by new financial elites and palaces by political ones, while the evacuated military and police installations of colonial armies, as well as their prisons, were often used by the governments that replaced them, recreating similar spatial hierarchies. Subversion, finally, aims at profanation of structures that are both symbol and instruments of spacial control, in order to restore the common use of spaces. The first stage when looking at colonial architecture in Libya should be investigating how and whether these strategies have been used and – in perspective – how they could be used on buildings and urban centres on which intervention is still possible.

The word I like in Longari’s article is “reinterpretation”. In fact, we also have to reckon with the fact that no building should be allowed the privilege to last forever. In a way, sometimes the energy spent in harnessing the space must be released to be vital again – and this is a form of reinterpretation. Sometimes monuments that crumble down are not “lost”, but “regained”.

The right the local population indeed has to be granted now is exactly the right to reinterpretate. These attacks launched today with the Odissey Dawn operation will surely claim more lives, may they be Libyans or mercenaries. The Europeans could not afford losing access to Libya’s oil, the Arab League is happy to do away with the Libyan dictator’s antics and the international public opinion could not take the news of the brave rebels being crushed any longer. A tricky alliance of intentions, most certainly. We cannot anticipate where this will lead, but in the short term anything seemed better than just seeing mercenaries slaughtering freedom fighters. In the medium term all depends on the right leadership emerging from the rebels, a leadership that is able to twist this mismatched alliance of intentions and reinterpretate it toward the best outcome for the Libyan people.

A man scrambles up the wall of a derelict watchtower in the middle of a military camp wearing a wading waistcoat and carrying a tripod. He’s a ornithologist, and he goes to the abandoned Israeli military base of Oush Grab (Beit Sahour, Bethlehem region) to study birds migrating from Turkey to Egypt through Palestine. Since the military left the base, the birds have started using the base as a stopover point, temporarily inhabiting the structures left behind season after season. The military camp was established by the British during the Mandate on Palestine, after the First World War, and has since been used, in turn, by the Jordanians and the Israelis. The space had been congealed for decades into the shape of a walled up instrument of control, that had a crucial influence of the life of people who lived next to it, however off-limits it was for them. Today, the site is the theatre for a chess game between the settlers, who want to found a new town there, the army that supports them, the international activists and the NGO’s that try to stop them and the Beit Sahour municipality that tries to make it into a public park.
Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal were inspired by the work of the ornithologist and the spontaneous practice of the birds. The artists/architects founded a few years ago in Bethlehem an architectural collective aimed at investigating security/control devices and engaging with the spatial realities of the Israeli-Palestinian in a propositional manner. The collective came up with a proposal that doesn’t aim at re-articulating and thus doing reiterating the function of the site, but at profaning it. The goal of their proposal is to release the energies harnessed when establishing and maintaining the site of control, and at the same time encourage both the birds in their seasonal return and nature in its slow process of dismantling of the man-made structures. This threefold programme is behind the idea of piercing all the walls of the buildings to provide a myriad inlets for the birds and let the buildings happily crumble down – not to be “lost”, but to be “regained”.

Text © Gabriele Oropallo, 2009. Photos © Nina Kolowratnik, Alessandro Petti, 2009.

I didn’t take any plane but I’m way jet-lagged. I glance across the Gilo checkpoint from the balcony of a luxury resort, and I can sample a view that encompasses a landscape going from the third world to the very first in a few kilometres. I arrived in West Jerusalem and started my exploration into the (controversial) world of Israeli biblical archaeology. The dig on which I worked looked fascinating, with several layers of stratification that to the clear minds should be enough to demonstrate that this disputed land is best described as an omnibus, with passengers hopping on and off over the centuries. I’ve once been told that biblical archaeology in this land is about colonizing the past, while soldiers, farmers and ultra-orthodox settlers colonize the future. Israel’s first president said that the citizens of the new state had to keep their hands firmly in the soil, referring to the adjacent practices of agriculture and archaeology. After a week of participant observation, it turns out that some of the dig supervisors, local archaeologists, are very scientific in their approach and even critical of the political use of archaeology that’s been done over the years. To the point that the Israeli has to argue with the American volunteers who came here to find their Jewish roots, and believe that if a place is mentioned in the bible, then God granted perpetual ownership.

The name with which the dig is referred to, Ramat Rahel, is modern. This site was not mentioned in the Bible, and the reason for this is still under debate amongst archaeologists. Maybe it was a foreign outpost, and its position would support this view. On a hill higher than Jerusalem, half way between the capital and Bethlehem and overlooking the major trade route of Hebron Road, it made a perfect control device for the Assyrian that subjected the Kingdom of Judah in the fifth century BC. The site was developed during several phases and includes synagogues, churches, temples and mosques. Yet, one particularly intriguing section is the initially dull-looking B3: a stone quarry, turned burial ground in Byzantine times – and also the site of a trench during the 1948 and 1967 war, on the Israeli-Jordanian front. The supervisors of the dig are wary of the religious Jews that wonder around the site (which is a kibbutz, whose permanent residents run the resort) because according to religion, it’s forbidden to unearth Jewish graves. The tombs are given improbable coded names and swiftly covered with plastic canvases when strangers are around.

And yet, a few graves were already profaned a few decades ago by the very tractors that were digging the earth deep down to the bedrock to build the military trench, the outpost in which we also found a flagpole holder. Surgically cutting through the grave and exposing the remains inside them, those machines were actors of a fascinating and revealing game of perspectives on Zionism and its means and ends.

Here is visual story of my trip to Palestine/Israel in the summer of 2009.

Text and photography © Gabriele Oropallo, 2009.

Originally published by Verso in 2007, Eyal Weizman’s book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation is a history of the process of transformation by which Palestinian space (underground, at ground level and in the air above the ground) is constantly redesigned in order to be kept under control. Or, rather than a history, one could call it a medical record, since the patient under analysis is still suffering the symptoms and effects of its condition. Hollow Land is now translated for the first time in a foreign language, and published by Italy’s Bruno Mondadori Editore with the title Architettura dell’occupazione: spazio politico e controllo territoriale in Palestina e Israele. The book was translated by yours truly last winter, during the development of the recent Gaza crisis, at the end of which around 15% of the buildings in the Stripe were left destroyed – an acceleration of the very processes described in the book, which provided a continuous memento of the urgency of the project. After taking stock of the latest events, in the new preface the author writes that in Palestine the spatial conflict ‘goes beyond a search for a stable and permanent “governable” colonial form’. On the contrary, it is through this ‘constant transformation of space that this process of colonization has played out’. The transformation of space, rather than being a goal, is the very instrument through which control is articulated, and violence, far from being casual and being triggered by a confrontational configuration of space, is the very tool to design it.

The cover of the Italian edition features a new image, that refers to the practice of ‘walking through walls’, used by the Israeli army to reinterpret urban space when fighting in refugee camps.

Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).

Eyal Weizman, Architettura dell’occupazione: spazio politico e controllo territoriale in Palestina e Israele, tr. Gabriele Oropallo (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2009).

The book will be also presented at this year’s Mantova book festival.