Eyal Weizman: Repair Work & Communal Life - Worlds

"Repair work can only ever be inadequate and partial. If even possible, repair for violent events, just like the restitution of stolen objects or lands, needs to be mindful of the ways these temporal-things must be woven back into their social, relational fabric. Whether in the Grenfell Tower where all homes were lost in the most horrific incident the city has seen this century, or in the context of decolonial practice when claims for the return of stolen and ethnically cleansed lands are made, I’d think through attempts at weaving back a communal life-worlds cut asunder."

Eyal is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where in 2005 the founded the Centre for Research Architecture. In 2007 he set up, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine.

He is the author of many books, including Hollow Land, The Least of all Possible Evils, Investigative Aesthetics, The Roundabout Revolutions, The Conflict Shoreline and Forensic Architecture.

He is also a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Separation & Reparation: the RCA School of Architecture Public Lecture Series 2022–23
Co-curated by Charlotte Grace & Thomas Aquilina

Carrying the common wind of our Repossession and Co-liberation series from the past two years, the 2022–23 SoA Public Lecture Series looks to articulate*, in thought and form, the notions of Separation and Reparation.

We are all too familiar with Separation, the crucible of architecture's long exclusionary history. Now, as we seek to recover our past and reconcile our present, we look to Reparation for clarity. Akin yet distinct from Unity, from resolution, even from repair, Reparation asks us to build a world where exclusionary practices are no longer reproduced. This lecture series aims to foster a shared spatial language that can trace its contours and lay its foundations.

*Articulation itself stems from cutting or dividing, to break something down into related but distinct parts. Yet it also refers to clarification, to bring something into legibility. We must build our capacity to articulate separation and reparation in order to work in solidarity with social and spatial projects or emancipation.