 This is a very unique session, very special, very needed on decolonizations. We have Sandy Hilao and Alessandro Petti from Decolonization Architecture Research, with us online here today, and also Denise Ferreira da Silva from New York University, professor from New York University, and well-known by also all our community. And they will be responded by Hiba Boakar and Atelya Kourakiwala from RGSAP community and faculty. I want to say that this is basically the, this is a topic that we included in affirmations as a long time ago, and it was at that point as important as it is now, and relevant and crucial, maybe now more urgent than ever in the situation that world is in. This is something that it was already, it was incredibly relevant and avoidable when we were working on affirmation sessions, but now it seems equally important, but more urgent than ever under the current circumstances. And G-SAP is a school that is committed to interrogating colonization and coloniality and explore decolonization as a spatial practice, a material practice, and that's why the work of Sandy and Alessandro has been a reference in this building for a long time now. This is something that our faculty, students, and researchers have been addressing through their work, their teaching, their research, and their activism, and it's a very important moment to reiterate the school's commitment to freedom of speech and academic freedom and the capacity to have these discussions and think this through together as a school. This is something of course that is addressing the research, scholarship, and teaching that we do, and we keep doing this during these days, and personally I want to say that I feel that I have a very strong commitment against violence and war, and my feeling is that this is broadly shared by the school's faculty, students, and researchers. I'm happy that we can have these discussions here and that we can work together to probably think of possible different futures for our communities, for the world. This session will be introduced by Barjan Polman, and then we will ask Sandy and Alessandro to intervene, and after them, Denise, we will ask you to intervene, and that will follow by the responses by Hiba and Ateja, and it will be open to a Q&A with the entire audience here, but also to our planetary cohort and those that are following the session online. So Barjan, please. Thank you, Andres, and welcome everyone to what is now the fifth of affirmations, and as always, I want to welcome not only all of you present here in the room, but also all of you who join us remotely on GCEP's YouTube channel, and particularly the members of our planetary cohort of respondents who are joining us across many different time zones. So again, good night, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening to you. I want to especially welcome Sandy Hilal and Alessandro Petti of DAAR, the Colonizing Architecture Art Research, who are joining us remotely, as well as Denise Ferreira de Silva, who's also joining us remotely, and GCEP professors Ateja Kora Kivala and Hiba Bouakkar. This session was intended to be an in-person conversation, but the speakers requested to be remote. And however, Ateja and Hiba are joining us in person, so we have a sort of hybrid conversation. My name is Barjan Pulman. I'm the Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming here at GCEP. And it's been a few weeks since our last affirmations, so as a reminder, I want to stress once again that affirmations is a project, a project that was developed as a series addressing emergencies through multiple lenses and voices with topics that should be understood as intersecting rather than isolated. Perhaps even more important than as the title suggests, this series is meant to affirm possibilities, possibilities for ecosystems, societies and worlds to come, discussed through the built environment and as emerging from the ruins of manifold contemporary crises, possible futures that emerge from the cracks in the structures of powers built on the interdependency of carbonization, extractivism, colonization, racialization, anthropocentrism, inequality, patriarchy and technocracy. With our session so far, we have seen many threats that we've throughout these intersecting toppings and that no doubt will continue this evening, which is urgent in so many ways. I'll keep my remarks brief so there's a little more time for compensation because once again, the format of affirmations is really meant to be a conversation rather than a lecture or a series of lectures. So we'll first have Alessandro and Sandy present for about 25 minutes followed by Denise and then we'll get the initial responses first from Hiba and then from Athea before we open it up to you, the audience and the planetary cohort and we should be done around 8, 8.15 p.m. So now over to the formal introductions. First, we have a presentation by Sandy Hilal and Alessandro Petti of Dar, the colonizing architecture art research. Dar founded as the colonizing architecture art residency with A.L. Weitzman in 2007, continually engages with the practice firmly rooted in research, art, pedagogy and politics and that I quote, acts within and against the condition of permanent temporariness. Based between Bezuhur and Stockholm, their work is strongly engaged in struggles for justice and equality. In 2013, along with A.L. Weitzman, they called for a re-examination of such struggles by shifting from historical view of revolution to an ongoing decolonization perspective through their book entitled Architecture After Revolution. Notable projects include the reconstruction of Alnada social housing, the creation of a concrete tent for communal use in Bethlehem's refugee camp, which show recent iteration for the Sharjah triennial and I know that several of you in the audience were actually able to see it last week. And the reshaping of the Shufat school layout in 2014, opening for alternative forms of pedagogies. Dar's work extends to educational initiatives like compassing camps and a three school project in Brazil, Mexico, India, Croatia, Hong Kong, Australia, further developing learning environments globally. Among the many awards received by the firm, their project entity, the Colony, which focuses on the reuse of colonial fascist architecture in Borgo Ritza, Sicily, was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participation in the most recent Venice Biennial created by Leslie Locco. Denise Ferreira da Silva is the Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities Department of Spanish and Portuguese and co-director of the critical racial and anti-colonial study lab at New York University. Her works, which crucially operates across many different disciplines, addresses global issues through an anti-colonial black feminist perspective. Her important and remarkable books include Towards a Global Idea of Race from 2007 and Unpayable Depth from 2022, which defy traditional Western frameworks and race questions related to coloniality and the understanding of race taken into account to global dynamics of power and oppression. As an artist, her work includes the movie Serpent Rain from 2016 and Four Waters Deep Implicancy from 2018, in collaboration with Arjuna Neumann and the studio practice Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. Da Silva's work engages with issues related to the politics of knowledge production and the decolonization of academia, reevaluating existing epistemological frameworks. She has exhibited and lectured worldwide, including at the Pompidou Center, Whitechapel Gallery, Mass, Raina Sofia, Guggenheim and MoMA. Hiba Boakar is an associate professor in the urban planning program here at Columbia GSEP. Her research focuses on planning in conflict and post-conflict cities, the questions of urban security and violence and the role of religious political organizations in the making of cities. Boakar's book For the Warrior to Come, Planning by Roots Frontiers, which was published by Stanford University Press in 2018, has won multiple awards and currently she is working on a new project entitled sedimentary urbanization for which she received the 2019 Rockefeller Foundation Academic Writing Fellowship. Ateya Korakivala is an architectural historian and assistant professor of architecture here at Columbia University GSEP and her research focuses on India's development decades. The work examines the aesthetics and materiality of its post-colonial infrastructure and ecological and political landscapes and her current book project is called Femine Landscapes and is an infrastructural and architectural history set in India's post-colonial countryside. Other research projects include the labor politics and environmental histories of architectural materials like concrete, bamboo and plastic. And with that, I would like to open the floor to Alessandro and Sandi. Maybe before we begin, I would like to maybe acknowledge the hesitations we felt in engaging in this conversation tonight. That's also one of the reasons why we are online and not there, unfortunately. The current repression in Palestine makes everything seems wrong and inappropriate. However, after discussions with numerous friends and colleagues at Columbia, we have decided to proceed to honor the struggles of individuals and groups against occupation, colonialism and apartheid. We find ourselves in an unprecedented assault on Palestinians marked by highly dangerous escalation led by the US government, coupled with a suppression of critical voices in Western institutions in particular. Prior to this talk, I was advised to avoid using terms such as ceasefire or peace, as they are considered now controversial. The term decolonization, which is the title of tonight's gathering, is even banned now on social media's platform, curricula and cultural institutions. We are entering one of the most obscure chapter of Western history. Spaces for critical conversations are closing down and we have to get prepared to build alternative platform to continue our conversations and action elsewhere. In this spirit, we extend the invitation to join architects and planners against apartheid. It is a call to avoid isolation or worse, silence and complicity in the face of the current situation. We need to move beyond statements and build new spaces for action and critical reflection. Well, indeed, maybe I would like to put the foundation of who I am today, who is the architect in me and which was the pillars of becoming architects. Indeed, in this dark time we are living, I would like to remind myself and the room is that this image in front of us, and I am one of these people that were shouting already when I was 13 years old and I am now 50. I was shouting when I was 13 years old during the first defada and actually shouting for a free life, for having open schools and open universities. Indeed, this was the moment where this was my maybe first understanding how important it is to still be studying, to still understand knowledge as a way of building narration, right? And in that moment, when I was teenage, schools and universities were completely shut down by the Israeli military colonial occupation. And in that sense, I myself, I am the product of these neighborhood schools that in minutes, that kind of collectivity that is what is still holding in Palestine, what is still holding in Gaza today, that kind of collectivity I saw my parents, I saw my neighbors, I saw everybody around me checking any living room that was empty in that moment, any garage that was empty, and we organized immediately ourselves and suddenly I was studying in these neighborhood schools knowing that only by studying as a teenage, I was breaking the rule of my occupier, right? And in that sense, this was really the first moment where I understood that I can be physically occupied, I can be physically colonized, but I still have the chance to decolonize my mind. It is during the first intifada, it is I myself learned during the first intifada and during the nonviolence struggle, the Palestinian nonviolent struggle on what does it mean and how we absolutely should hold on our, our right to decolonize our mind, even if our bodies are still colonized by our Israeli occupier. And in that sense, maybe another image and here I'm really drawing the images that that was at the foundation of my, of my education, right? This is another image like the one of the collectivity that I always brought with me wherever I went. And this is the first house that I witnessed being demolished. And again, I was still a teenager. And I, in my eyes, I witness a man looking at his house, staying at the rubble of his house, thinking about the heritage that he is losing in their own piece of that house, but still standing and thinking how to move forward. And in that sense, that kind of resilience stayed so strongly with, with, with me in, in also my studying architecture in Western institutions. And, and here maybe, again, I would like to begin with how we began to practice, right? And, and both me and Alessandro studied architecture in Venice, we met there and then we decided that we would like to come and practice in Palestine. And indeed, you know, when we returned back, we were both at the end of our PhDs. And we began to make questions such what does it mean to be an architect under living under colonization and thinking what does it mean to decolonize architecture within a context like Palestine, right? And at that moment, we also began to work within refugee camps and within that Palestinian resistance, collectivity and insistence to actually still be living that life. And when we arrived to refugee camps, we realized that all our Western knowledge did not help us to understand what we were witnessing, right? I mean, in, in refugee camps, private is not private, public is not public. Resilience has a complete different meaning. Neighboring is is is is an act of resilience and solidarity. Hospitality takes a complete different meaning. And indeed, in order for us to understand better, we decided to establish a university in a refugee camp. And that university was actually an attempt to build a collective dictionary. And in that sense, we were very much thinking what a life that is made of a permanent temporariness made of what does it mean to stay to be in a place still belonging somewhere else? What does it mean to belong to more than one place simultaneously? And indeed, while working with refugees, they challenged us and says, you know, but you are architects, right? I mean, what would be a building for a university in a refugee camp? And what would be a classroom of a refugee of a university in a classroom? And at that moment, the answer was a concrete tent, because a concrete tent is a university that is making questions rather than giving answers. A concrete and why concrete and what does it mean to live in a permanent temporariness? And that and all these questions that we had inside that concrete tent was in some way, maybe the base through which we then began to think what are the values? What are the ways we can understand heritage and collectivity in in refugee camps? And in that sense, what what I would like to move through is like, you know, we began to work and understand refugee camps beyond the only the the part of it being victimhood and misery, we began to understand refuge as a very important heritage. If today, as Palestinians, they would ask us to list what would be the most important heritage that we carry? We would absolutely answer refugee camps and exile. I mean, this is what we have been into in the last 70 years of our history. And yet, this is not inscribed in any because because heritage is only preserved by nation states. This is where we began to think how what kind of projects can still be giving that value to refugee camps? And here we will show you the refugee heritage project. Do refugee camps have history? This was the fundamental question at the base of the nomination of the Haitian refugee camp as UNESCO World Heritage Site. Refugee camps are established with the intention of being demolished. They are not accepted to have a history or a future that are meant to be forgotten. The history of refugee camps is constantly erased, dismissed by states, humanitarian organization, international agencies, and even by refugee community themselves in fear that any acknowledgement of the present undermines their right of return. The only history in fact that is recognized within refugee communities is one of violence, suffering, and humiliation. How then we understand the life and the culture that people built in camps, despite suffering and marginalization? The photo that you see here are part of UNESCO dossier producing over two years of discussions with refugee communities, local residents, heritage experts, and cultural producers. Member of the camp strongly expressed their fear that the nomination would change the status quo and threaten to undermine the legally recognized right of return. At the same time, many expressed their desire to see refugee history being acknowledged and attempt to bring back the right of return at the center of the political discussion. We were interested here in documenting the life, the spaces, and the political structures that emerge in almost seven decades of exile. Palestinian camps are not made anymore of tents. They are complex urban structure, and we don't have the right vocabulary to understand and describe this forced condition of permanent temporariness. In understanding today's refugee condition beyond the humanitarian crisis, refugee heritage traces, documents, reveals, and represent refugee history beyond the narrative of suffering and displacement. Beid Jibrin, Beid Natif, Al-Lar, Khirbet Al-Tannour, Ras Abou Ammar, Al-Qabou, Beid Atab, Sufla, Beid Mahseer, Al-Shua, Al-Islien, Sar'a, Ar-Touf, Der Rafat, Der Al-Hawah, Lifta, Der Yasin, Ayn Karim, Al-Malha, Staf, Soobah, Khirbet Al-Lawz, Kassla, Der Abaan, Al-Joura, Zakaria, Al-Brij, Kudna, Zakreen, Der Dabbaan, Der Al-Sheikh, Jarash, Mghallas, Al-Jour, Al-Walajah. These are the names of the villages of origin of which Palestinians were expelled and now reside in the Haisha refugee camp. Israel demolished more than 300 villages in 1948 in order to prevent Palestinians from returning to their homes. Today, only a few public buildings like schools, mosques and cemeteries are standing as material evidence to the expulsion of the Palestinians. Today, these villages have for the most part been substituted with exclusive Jewish-Israeli towns, national parks and industrial areas. Refugee camps and villages of origin are associated with the same history of displacement and disposition. They are both illegal limbo and suspended. On the one hand, the camp is a permanent, temporary space of emergency carved out of the state sovereignty. While on the other hand, the village is legally defined by the Israeli state as absentee property. Despite their geographical separations, the two sides clearly have direct links and connections. Therefore, we see the possibility and the urgency of nominating the Haisha refugee camp and the 44 villages of origin as a serial, transpoundary, world heritage site, according to the UNESCO World Heritage Site criteria. And indeed we have been, I have to say, we have been obsessed with understanding what kind of heritage we can still be indeed thinking of by not because because the main problem of what we really face is that we dismiss that life in exile and we dismiss that buildings that are now becoming rebels. And I think that if we have a task today as architects and planners, is to understand how not to dismiss that history. That history is a history of resilience, is a history of rebels. Yet it is to be narrated. It needs to be narrated. And it would be a double nekba if we will accept that we will ourselves dismiss that history. And indeed with all what we learn from Palestine, I have to say, we return back to Italy and to Europe in particular to understand what does it mean learning from Palestine? What does it mean for us to decolonize Europe or to begin to think what does it mean today if Palestinian decolonization is by facing the Israeli military occupation? What does it mean today to decolonize in Europe? And what kind of projects that we can eventually be engaged with? In 1940, the Italian fascist regime established the entity of colonization of Sicilian latifundium following the model of the entity of colonization of Libya and colonial architecture in Eritrea and Ethiopia. These territories were considered by the regime empty, underdeveloped and backward and therefore it needed to be reclaimed, modernized and repopulated. For this purpose, the entity of colonization inaugurated eight new rural towns in Sicily and as many remained unfinished. Today, most of these villages have fallen into ruin. However, what does not seem to be ruined is the persistence of fascist, colonial and modernist rhetoric, culture and politics. Despite the fall of fascism following the Second World War, Europe de-fascistizations unfortunately remains an unfinished process. This is one of the reasons why there are so many visible architections and monuments that celebrate fascist regime. Moreover, having lost its colonies during the Second World War, some European country have never embarked in a real process of decolonization. With the emergence of fascist ideologies in Europe, it becomes urgent to ask, what kind of heritage is the fascist, colonial and modernist heritage? And who has the right to reuse it? Should this heritage simply be demolished or could be reoriented towards other ends? The European colonial model project of exploitation, segregation and dispositions has divided the world into races and nations constructing its own identity in opposition to other projects labelled simply as traditional or backward. The suppression of alternative wars and still is an attempt to create a singular modernist colonial epistemology. Therefore, modernity cannot exist without the disqualification and degradation of other approaches and world views. In 2017, the nomination of Asmara, the capital of Eritrea as UNESCO World Heritage Site for its modernist colonial architecture built by the fascist regime during the Italian occupation, posed a series of fundamental questions for both the ex-colonized and the ex-colonizer. Who has the right to preserve, reuse and re-narrate fascist colonial and modernist architecture? While architecture and modernism in particular continues to be celebrated for its progressive social and political agenda, what the modernist rhetoric of progress and innovation obscure is its dark side, namely its inherent homogenizing authoritarian and segregational dimensions. These modernist conception are still present in contemporary architecture and urban planning, when in the name of modern architecture entire communities, form of living, and historical size are simply erased. While a critique of modernism alone is not enough, having already been conducted by post-modernism, the task of the present is additionally to imagine architectural forms of demodernization. Demodernization indeed does not mean opposing the use of electricity and wiring. Mortar and beams or technology or infrastructure. Instead, it means profaning the separations, disconnections, and isolations embodied by architectural modernism. By opposing modernity, aggressive universalism, demodernization is a method of desegregation that applies as both discourse and praxis to invent form of reappropriation and reuse of modern architecture. In recent years, the right-wing Sicilian regional government in an effort to re-legitimize fascist policies decided to fund architectural conservation of the agricultural towns built by the entity of colonization of Sicilian latifundium, restoring them as they were originally built. Against this nostalgic approach in Borgorica in Sicily, we collaborated with the municipality of Carlentini, the local community, and university to establish a difficult heritage summer school, a space for critical pedagogy and discussions around practices of re-appropriation and re-narration. Over the years, we started to discuss with the local municipality how to turn the former entity of colonization of Sicilian latifundium in Borgorica into an entity of decolonization. This collective process has been open to all of those who felt the urgency to question the broader historical, cultural, and political heritage embedded in colonialism, fascism, and modernism, and therefore begin a path towards new practices of decolonization and de-modernization. In addition to the commitment in Borgorica, we felt the need to take the conversation in other context to expand the possibility of learning from different places and build new alliances. The artistic installation, the colonization, profane the entity of colonization of Sicilian latifundium in Sicily, breaking down and recomposing its facade into several modular seats. These are reused as a platform for an open discursive space where the public is invited to critically reconsider the social and political and economic effects of fascism and colonialism. Colonial modernist architecture, both in the former colonies and in colonizing countries, have been built as isolated and sacred objects to be admired. Therefore, for us, it's not enough simply to reuse them in the same way previous regimes have used them, nor simply to demolish them. They need to be profane. They need to be used against themselves and open for new common uses, different from what those that were designed for. Giorgio Agamben proposed the idea of profanation as a strategy for returning things to their common uses. Profaning does not simply mean abolishing or canceling separations, but learning to make new uses of them. To profane is to transgress the dividing line to use it in particular ways. The colonizing architecture, therefore, could be understood as an act of profanation, which does not simply displace power, but using its destructive potential to reverse its functioning and subverts its uses. In May 2006, the Israeli army evacuated the military camp strategically located on the highest hill at the southern entrance of Beth-Sahur in Bethlehem. It was built as a military base by the British mandatory army. And after 1948, it became a military base of the Jordan Legion. And in 1976, it became an Israeli military base. The most controversial part of the site is the top of the hill. There, several concrete buildings from the heart of the former camp, surrounded by a giant mound of earth that runs along the top of the edge of the hill. The hill in Arabic, it's called Oshegrab, the cronest. In the days, immediately following its evacuation, Palestinian entered the military base and took away any elements and materials that could be recycled. At this time, there were some people who demanded that the military base continue to be used as a military base for Palestinians, while others knew that it was necessary to change its function and its military function was not to continue. For a few months, the military base worked for the ex-prisoner as a device to tell the story of violence and torture that the ex-prisoner had suffered in the military base. Israeli settlers with military protection reoccupied the military base with intention to transforming into a new settlement. But we didn't give up and we took possession of the military base again. But they come back and after a few weeks, but also we come back. We stage a series of events which disoriented the Israeli soldier who were expecting violent demonstrations. Simultaneously, with this series of actions, Imad Al-Atrash, director of the Palestinian Wildlife Society, jumped on one of the military towers from which soldiers were shooting at the Palestinians and used the tower exactly against himself, profaning its function, turning into a bird-watching point. The military tower that once functioned as a panopticon to control the Palestinian population, it was reused by Imad as an observatory for plants and bird migration. Imad explained to us that thousands of migratory birds can be seen stopping in Oshograb every spring and fall. There are approximately 520 bird species and 2,700 plant species found in this area. So it is considered an important base for migratory birds using the Jordan Valley Jericho Roots and the Jerusalem Mountains. The path of the birds migrating from Siberia to Southern Africa converge on Palestine. The flocks tend to nest on hills of Palestine, such as Oshograb. One day, Imad irritated asked, you are Arctic, aren't you? So instead of wasting time planting tree, walking people around, organizing demonstration, why not to produce an architectural design for Oshograb? By accepting his challenge, our proposal for the reuse of the site become an intervention in the political struggle for the hill. Because of its revolving door occupation, it become fundamental to make the buildings inhospitable to human activity. So rather than renovating and converting the base to give it another function, the intention was to increase the process of its destruction and disintegration. In this way, the project become a project of obsolition where the top of the hill with its military barracks is no longer used by man, but instead is returned to nature. Our colleagues at the Palestinian Wildlife Society expected the birds to come and inhabit these holes, turning Oshograb into a large bird nest. Thank you. Thank you. Hello, hi everybody. I would like to thank Andres and Bartran and everyone at G. I still don't know how to say. Zep, for the invitation to be in conversation with Sandy and Alessandro. Yes, when I was invited, I had something in mind that I could talk about in very direct conversation with the work you have been doing. And thank you for the work you do. Actually, it's a pleasure to be here with you. I forgot to say that. But I'm feeling inadequate like everybody else in this impossible moment. And both of you spoke very directly and effectively to why anything that we do, everything that we do as usual is, yeah, it's unqualifiable, right? Because it pales in face of so much horror, so much violence that people are facing in Gaza and in other parts of Palestine in this moment. So I am going to talk about decolonization, but it's going to come from some place other than the way, you know, then directly. But more, maybe more directly, I could say that I'm going to elaborate on something that I treat not very explicitly sometimes or not very, and I don't take so much time, I treat. I'm referring to when I talk about decolonization as the return of the total value expropriated and extracted from natural lands and enslaved bodies under conditions of total violence. And it's also implicit in the understanding of coloniality that it's in my work, which is a modality of government that relies primarily on the threat and deployment of total violence. But I'm not going to talk about those things because I have been arrested by the present and I cannot but speak to this moment. So I wrote this short presentation which has the title Beyond Good and Evil A Draft Proposition for a Dreadful Occasion. And well, I'm going to share with you, I think it speaks to pretty much everything that you have presented, but in a very indirect way. So let's see how the questions will bring us together. But this is an offering to all of us. So earlier this year in Paris, where I lived from early February through mid June, almost every week, tens of thousands of workers, students, academics marched along major avenues against protesting Emmanuel Macron's bill that increased the retirement age, also protesting against France police and the whole range of new liberal reforms that have been destroying workers' rights but also social rights in general in France and elsewhere. French workers and youth who protested and were confronted by the police, however, did not convince French politicians to vote against Macron's bill to protect that one labor rights. Their demand went unheard because it seems that elected representatives, including the president against whom they were protesting, that elected representatives were oblivious to their demand for protection, to that expression of the collective will. By the end of May, we had to acknowledge that unique industrial action, a rebellion that brought the old and the young, the white, brown, black, LGBTQ, I-plus, cis, women, men, workers, students, academics, undocumented and documented migrants, artists and so many to the streets of Paris and everybody at some point singing everyone, the tests, the police. Well, that rebellion against the new liberal state, it had been defeated. Move all the way to last Wednesday evening here in New York at Washington Square Park, a group of Palestinian and other mostly BIPOC young protesters, probably students, were demanding ceasefire and they were being confronted by pro-Israel protesters. A few NYU security and NIPG police officers separated, stood between the two of them. At first, that seemed like a perfect station of democracy, maybe even different, the opposite to the French one. At first, until one, you notice the line of police officers who were there with the presumed mandate for preserving public order. And that made it impossible not to compare that scene of Wednesday with the one I saw and in which I participated in Paris throughout the first half of this year. As I watched the scene unfolded in Washington Square Park, it was impossible not to see it as a rehearsal of that defeat that I experienced in May. But now the defeat is not here, there's not so much about losing a battle, but about losing the battle's ground, the political stage, because the streets, the utmost stage for radical political events, for the expressions of dissatisfaction with the liberal institutions. But in New York City, in the New York City scene, that scene, our moment now, the street has been turned into a moral stage which is signaled by the enforcing line of police officers and with the task of preserving the integrity of the public space or of the public body, however we, or territory, however we wanna talk about it. So by defeat, I mean that when the moral ethic replaces the civil, the juridic in the scene of confrontation, in this case, the taking to the streets, that's the scene of confrontation. And we know that taking it to the streets is what we do when all democratic mechanisms fail or seem to be failing, or we know that they are not going to work. So we take it to the streets. But in this moment, that stage has been depoliticized because what we have as really is the actual or potential criminalization of protests which immediately turns the police, the tool of the repressive state into the protective authority for everybody else, not for those who are protesting. And here really doesn't matter whether or not the state uses or threatens the use of lethal force or threatens the deployment of total violence. What matters is that this shift dissolves robbery because the streets, one strip of its political significance, it turns into that impersonal liminal space where criminality abounds, they say. And of course the case here, because I don't make it very explicit in the draft proposition, but the case here is precisely one about taking criminality as a political signifier, as a political tactic and not to leave it out there in that moral context. But we can talk about that later. So these two things I find to speak directly to what is perhaps the most important thing we face as critical scholars and practitioners and teachers, but speaking primarily to the critical scholars and teachers. To us, the crucial challenge in this moment is also the most important mandate, which is to articulate critical statements which are not arrested by the governing simplifying discourse that immediately turns every exchange into a sequence of postings in social media feeds. Here I find it's precisely an instance and then it towards contributing for doing that critical work. I'm proposing to read this movement for the discrimination and the choreography that is in there as an instance of activation of a key component of what I call the liberal political architecture, which is the colonial, racial, cis-hetero-patriarchal matrix. That matrix, it's the entrails of the liberal formation. It hosts a formative, I call it intrastructural element called, which is authority. And the authority actually operates in and through the celebrated principles of liberty and equality and a principle that is not usually activated, which is integrity. So working that way, authority is constitutive of the liberal political subject, be that the citizen or the state. And an important aspect of authority is that in being constitutive of the liberal political subject, it is not extended to those over which it is exercised. That is, those under colonial racial cis-hetero-patriarchal subjugation. Those can never claim authority. But still the critical text, the tools, the critical tools we have in our hands, which have been so precise in terms of identifying and challenging the operations of these various components of the matrix. The critical text consistently misses authority precisely because of the focus is on the infrastructural level. That is called the molecular level. And that which is on that which allows, only allows for subjugation to be described in terms of hierarchy and inequality, subjugation under them within the liberal formation. And I think more importantly, because authority enters in the composition of the liberal political subject, that is, it's constitutive matter. It is always presupposed and never subjected to philosophical elaborations and, or with no critical theoretical excavations. And for this reason, it operates unchecked infrastructurally throughout the liberal architecture, which means that it has been cultivated, rehearsed, and manifested at the level of the sensibility and not, but it's not being formed, theorized, and experienced at the level of subjectivity, which is a distinction that's small, but important. So by this, I mean that authority operates in as the matter that composes the liberal stage and not in what is formed or in that which is staged, or in the very scenes performed in the liberal stage. As such, the sensibility, sorry. So this lack of attention to authority then is important because it escapes the formalizations that we deploy in our critical work. So for instance, when considering the state, that has been a focus on legitimacy, but not on what it bases its authority. And why? Well, we know that both legitimacy and authority in a way also refers to what was once called by the cultural or the ideological level, or which I call the ethic and the symbolic level. But they are different in that legitimacy because the political context that's been designed by Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophers, which were the limiting, establishing that which is distinctive of the modern itself. And as such, what is and what's not legitimate has been formed and transformed in the operations of the ethic and symbolic moments of post-Enlightenment political discourse. Now, I'll start it on the other hand, also refers to the ethic and the symbolic, but of that as guided by the divine, the image, the figure of the divine author and ruler. So as such, it is not so much a creation of modern philosophy, but it's a kind of raw material that has, that it's being used in the very designing of the liberal formation. And it operates as raw material, like as an elemental aspect, precisely because the obedience to the divine law of self-preservation is what is at the basis of the justification for the building of modern juridical forms, such as the state and the law. And then, of course, that raw material has remained in modern philosophical and political discourse while the divine has been demoted to the cultural or to the religious and those other aspects. Anyway, so it's not surprising then that authority figures in the classic modern philosophical texts in the, but in the figure of the patriarch, right? The patriarch that transmutes into the political subject, which is not the basic juridic and economic entity, and following the mandate for self-preservation, the patriarch relinquish part of its liberty and part of its authority to a higher form of the state and the constitution in order to protect that integrity, whether the integrity of their body, but also to protect the property. So no longer a divine law in modern political texts, the mandate for self-preservation, which stays under the name of natural law, is attributed to the citizenry, the body politic and the state as the precondition for any other rights. As the point of departure or the archer form of the modern subject, it is more immediately recalled by the principle of integrity, the preservation of which is a task beyond the scrutiny of the modern juridical apparatus. So the notion of just necessities, which is a notion of self-preservation as a reason for committing an otherwise, something that an act that would otherwise be considered criminal. So that just necessities refers primarily to the claim to self-preservation. And before the claim to self-preservation, the claims to liberty and the quality they collapse. And it is self-preservation that carries authority into the modern political framework in connection with the concept of integrity. But of course, unless the claim to self-preservation is made by those who in the political, the liberal political architecture only exists as subjects under colonial racial and see the patriarchal subjugation. Why? Well, because the mandate for self-preservation or the protection of integrity does not apply to them as we can see articulated in the very descriptions of the... Oh, anyway, I'm not going to cover that. The second, because I can elaborate it later. So the second, liberty and the quality as principles are contingent upon the modern political subjects inherent claims to integrity or authority to preserve its body and integrity. So what I'm highlighting here is precisely that aspect of the modern liberal political entity that is articulated in claims for the necessity or the obligation to preserve the integrity of the political body territory. In the case of the citizens, it includes their own body or the citizen, his own body and his household, thinking of the classical political philosophical texts. So as I have argued elsewhere for the past 150 years or so, raciality has played a crucial role in support of deployment of total violence, justified as necessary for self-preservation of integrity of an individual as well as a collective body whether it's racial national purity, identity, territory, as public safety or security. Not surprisingly right now, raciality is again playing this role in support of otherwise unacceptable deployment of total violence by Israel. But it does so through criminalization also, not only but also the perverse irony cannot go, this perverse irony cannot go unnoticed that many of those being criminalized are living under colonial domination and or are those whose work, academic and artistic confronts colonial and racial subjugation. So but what is this proposition, this proposition that I hope is a conversation with Sandy and Alessandro's work and then also hope contributes to opening up a space for us to continue our critiques of the global present in particular of the operations of raciality and also critique of this remorse of fascism which now comes up against gains in terms of racial and gender sexual rights. But critiques that are not immediately caught in the prevailing simplified moralistic take on the operations of racial which usually stop at the accusation of racism that basically boils down to the identification of what's done as discrimination, of what's said as being about using old stereotypes. And I'm not saying that focusing on stereotyping and also discrimination dehumanization is not, what we should not do it. And I'm not saying that it's not relevant. I'm just saying that stop at the moment of diagnosing them which is what we have been doing in our critical work. It's not enough because they keep working against us in so many different unexpected ways. So, and the problem is why? Because such accusations including the accusation of racism they apply a moral design to the civil space. And by that I mean that in the case of the shifting scene that I mentioned earlier, the taking of streets which has been an expression of citizens dissatisfaction with the state has become redefined as criminal. And the point is that, but the criminal is a moral signified which quite immediately allows for the bypassing of the reflection, right? As it is expressed in the kind of simplified mannequin discursive that look in which we are caught right now. Now the use of criminalization as a tactic against protest have been going on for a while for a long time. But the most recently we can come back to the battle of Seattle in 1999 and then I was in the UK during the protests against James Cameron's cuts on social spending. Criminalization was there in the choreography of Kathleen in Rio de Janeiro in 2013. And then in Brazil, that is part of Brazil in 2016. And then of course in Paris earlier this year. What we're finding in all these cases is that when in the face of protest, the state unleashes the police to ensure public safety or security or to protect private property. We in those moments we are dealing with the state's deployment of criminality as a political strategy. But it happens very quickly, right? Because the collapse, the collapsing of rights happens immediately in the very threat and use of, in that the threat and use of little force becomes possible, it's happening. But anyway, at Washington Square Park or what I called a defeat was nothing more than the crowning of criminality. Because in that scene, what was figured is precisely criminality was figured precisely because the confrontation did not involve the police and the protesters but the confrontation was between the two groups. So what we had there was this logic of war and or the logic of enmity. And an important aspect of this moment I find is that this logic of war of attribution and enmity to the social subaltern like the racial gender sexual, sexual, to be subjugated, that attribution manifests among the populace in familiar fascistic manners and in a familiar fascistic manner, one in which the side are going to be under attack, undermined or violated and key here is integrity. That side seeks to control, take control of the narrative, the high moral ground and or of the state. So yeah, the key challenge in this moment is to dislodge the logic of war and the discourse on enmity and criminality and try and grasp how this moment is attending to the needs of global state capital and also what those needs are. So I find, I think that we need to shift the logic instead of remaining within the oppositional setup of confrontation, of confrontation. And this requires that we attend to the triangle and see how the presence of the police renders the scene one of criminality, of course. But then, but it's not, I should say, a move towards finding another general category which would name a new universal proper subject, like that plays the role that the proletariat plays in Marx's critique of capital because criminality does not affect all in the same way. So no matter how black the word appears to have become, criminality and the use of total violence, such attributions or support consistently attaches to the currently informed colonized and to the currently racially subjugated persons and populations as well as to those who go against that which this retro-patriarch establishes as proper expressions. In Paris, in direct confrontations with the protesters, the police reserve the specially aggressive and humiliating actions to the brown and black French youth in the same way that the prevailing discourse is now one that only accepts attribution of criminality, of evil and becoming dangerous extensions, ideas and actions to those calling for a ceasefire. Anyway, I know it feels like we can't breathe. It's still for those who will survive, we need to create a kind of physical intellectual space that will allow us all to survive psychically and to thrive politically as we navigate against these authoritarian winds. So we need to go back to the treasure chest and gather the tools that will allow us to redesign the streets as and should we take the streets as the locus for Beverly. Thank you. Hi, thank you so much, Alessandro and Sandy and Denise for wonderful talks. So like it is a difficult moment for you, it's difficult a moment for people who are on this campus to speak up against the violence that's happening in Palestine and Gaza. This is a, and being a person who's employed in this system makes it even double hard in many ways. And in some ways, yes, we need to redesign the streets as Denise said, to create conversations. At the other time it feels like every day is a battle line, every day is a day for just figuring out how you're gonna find space, how you're gonna talk to people, how you're gonna ceasefire. Like how is it that as a person who grew up in war, I don't understand how something like ceasefire is something controversial, how 13,000 people is not possibly a genocide, how is it that 5,000 children are dead is not something that we can speak about freely, that we don't have the academic freedom to talk about this. As a person who's now for the first time experiencing this, I wasn't here after September 11th, I don't understand how can we function in such a system where every day is a battle just to speak up for the atrocities that are happening in the world. Having said that, I'm just for the interest of time, I have two questions, one question for Dar and one for Denise. So in the tension between architecture and temporoneness, architecture, especially the way we teach it, it's about building and continuously making things and creating spaces. So in the tension between architecture and temporoneness, between living life and keeping the right to return alive for refugees, where does decolonization live? And what are the philosophies of decolonization behind your work? How do we think about decolonization at this moment when it's okay to mention decolonization when we're talking about certain spaces and certain people because somehow we made that journey but decolonization becomes criminalized when we're talking about brown folks and black folks and it's like where do we locate decolonization and where do you locate decolonization in your own work? And if possible, I would like you to extend that philosophy to Gaza City that has been flattened. We've seen north of the Gaza Strip has completely flattened. What would architecture of decolonization look like in the context of extreme cruelty and in the case of herbicide where the intention is not only of killing people but also the killing of the spaces of the people to stop the possibility of living and recreation and the killing of the communities that inhabit these spaces. Where does decolonization make room here? What does it mean for architecture practice when you see that much of destruction given that it's about focus so much about construction and it's different in your practice. So how do you locate that? And should I also give the second question? Let's start maybe with this one and then we'll go to the other one. Yeah, thank you Hiba for these comments and questions. I would like to try to, not to respond, maybe think a little bit with you and also maybe posing, building on what you were asking also, maybe continue asking some, another question too. So maybe one, it's also a question that I have following also what Denise was referring to as also the street as a side of protest, conflict and political agency and following that I'm also wondering what is the campus? Maybe the campus is not a street and which way therefore a campus at this time maybe could be transforming to something else, needs to be transforming to something else or the campus remain a little bit as the origin of the word suggest, which is a camp which is a kind of extra territorial space separated from the rest of the city. So maybe I have a little bit also a kind of question myself following Denise and Hiba trying to collapse a little bit both the theoretical and the practical understanding because this is what is ahead of some of us, especially some of you that are in this moment living in the States understanding what is the political architectural space of the campus and what is possible and what is not possible at this time to think there. So it's a little bit maybe also a kind of questions that also I would like to put a little bit for everyone. Regarding Hiba's questions around, let's say decolonization and returns as an act of decolonization in our work has been always incredibly important to think and I use the plural and not the singular as an act of decolonization. And today the impossibility of illegally, internationally recognized right of return of the Palestinian the possibility to think is also says a lot about the lack of political imaginations because of returns would mean also re-imagining entirely the possibility of inhabiting more than one space at the same time. And I think our incapacity to understand the return which is not an idea simply locked in a nation state that is pretty evident that fails and continue to fail to solve anything and instead of continuing to failing trying to put things back all these fragments and ruin and things back into this box that in a way it doesn't work and instead of doing that and that I think it's also our task as intellectuals or our cultural producer is to reopen our political imagination which returns will allow the people to live in more than one place at the same time. In our conversations many times in refugee camps imagine returns would also mean how your life not only going back in the place of origin that of course is not anymore what was more than 70 years ago but is also how the heritage in the camp and the space of the camp itself is actually part of that return because if you are not able also to imagine the return in that way we are failing in somehow going beyond the nation state. So in that to me the declining several form of returns would mean definitely moving forward a practice of decolonization these are incredibly connected. And lastly just very quickly in relation to let's say to the distractions of the destruction of the destruction of the destruction only our project in the north of Gaza a social housing project for 300 families. These were families that were already displays four times and one week ago all the buildings have been demolished once again and we lost contacts with them. So this is where what you are confronted and this is why the violence of selecting a date a moment in history that is another things that we have to challenge as a colonial frame with that should not cannot be acceptable if one look at the history and the layer of events even in one single family. And that is what is for us overwhelming because we worked with people that were already traumatized by generations that were refugees for so many times already. And one cannot even imagine what does it mean once again being reduced to rebels again and again. Yeah and maybe if I can add but I think that the Gaza what is going on what is happening now in front of our eyes the genocide that we are witnessing is making me think that up to today it feels like it's possible to speak about decolonization in the past and it's possible to speak about decolonization in the future but we do not know how to speak about decolonization in the present and in that sense I think it's extremely important to understand that we can speak about decolonization only if we own the narration and owning the narration means beginning not only to think architecture but to think Gaza in a complete bigger way to think Gaza as part of a way bigger environment around which people in Gaza do not only belong to Gaza I mean Gaza is made of 80% of refugees that came from many other places and if we have to rebuild Gaza it's extremely important to understand what is it that we are building because everybody would like us architects to rebuild Gaza as it was before and I think this is the task where the decolonization decolonization in Gaza is to refuse to rebuild Gaza in the same way is to think Gaza as a place from where we can imagine the world this is the minimum that we can do in order to respond to such genocide right and in that sense I think we are not unfortunately we are not equipped yet that does not mean that we don't have means to do it and unfortunately I don't think that western education that has been taught to the rest of the world because it's not only in Colombia that architecture is taught this way but also in Beirut University in Beirut in all the rest of the world we are studying architecture in the same way so we lack knowledge we lack capacities and therefore I think we have to create coalition between so many people of us understanding you know it's only 20 years ago we began the struggle you know only to link architecture and politics fell 20 years ago as a struggle right so I think we went quite ahead in the way but I don't believe that today even if we are speaking about decolonization in the faculties of architecture we are unable to speak about a present decolonization and we should take this into account and consideration amazing answers I mean I have so many thoughts I will just mention a few because in the interest of time and to keep time for but one of the interesting things when you're talking about campus I was hearing you know how they do tours of campus for like potentially future students with their families and stuff and they were talking about how 116 which is the street that crossed and the student was telling the visitors that the campus at some point got the authority to close the street 116th Street and so 116th Street became part of the campus and right now this is where they put the checkpoints with every protest they have the street was eaten by university and so the public space that was part of the city was at some point became a privatized to the university itself and so this is making me think also how do you want like how even the street in some ways even the public here is under the police under the certain kind of state and if the state is the oppressor or supporting the oppressor or funding wars then you actually the street you cannot own the street so it's very hard to even to create a battle for the street and like Denise was said is that one of the things that's happening is the losing the battlefield itself is that every day we have to I mean we've been in organizing meeting together for the past several days is that reinvent the space where you can actually have a battlefield for at least intellectual ideas and make room for that so this is one thing so thank you so much for your thoughts and my question to Denise is a little bit of a long question but I'll try to divide in two parts so in one of your essays I was trying I was familiarizing myself with your amazing work and one of your essays you talk about how the performance you encountered in black Brazil returned blackness to the scene of subjugation where killing is always more than a possibility not to reveal its truth but to render the depth of its refusal and fugitivity by like the artist the artist do that by concealing their bodies or making interventions that are unintelligible to the dominant racial viewer or consumer this made me think basically about the extreme nakedness that we're seeing today by the Palestinians that have to show every day to us on the screens 24 seven their amputated bodies they're dead children they're applied to the world like they have to be very visible they have to be friends transparent they have to show like the most inner feelings to the world so to be able to cultivate at the bare minimum the possibility to be seen as a human so given that I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the subaltern isolation oscillation between the politics of visibility and nakedness and the world asking them to do that just to see them as a human and the politics of refusal in the colonial practice so this is my first part and the second part is do actually the subalterns have the luxury of refusal and for example what would have happened if this lecture we are in today did not take place as politics of refusal against the machine of active invisibilization that basically wants to obscure the subaltern to render them inhuman every day and thus kill a bit thank you thank you Hiba and I will probably ask you to ask the second question later because I have no memory I'm totally gone and then I'm going to start with Alessandro's comment question about the campus I mean you already said you know some of what I was going to say in response and which is that yeah so the campus as a battleground is being lost when instead of actually confronting the campus police and the cops on campus the students are being told not you know they're being prohibited they can't even say anything right so even the possibility of confrontation has been taken away and I think that's you know again a sign of you know of these is not so much a shift because that modality of criminalization is being around for such a long time but I do think if you ask about the university then I think we also need to shift in our political imagination in terms of how we can make the university serve to the causes you know I don't think we can expect the university to remain a space where most of the work can be done you know as you were talking about at the beginning we need other spaces and we need to gather resources of the university to bring to other places to do the political work like all the you know the post enlightenment institutions this one is also compromised and I don't know if beyond hope I hope not but I don't know I'm not very optimistic but but the but he was a question about it is a it is a it is a predicament isn't it and I think it is the predicament of of the on the one hand the demand for for exposing and exhibiting the wound and then so as you provide evidence of of a right being violated or of violence being done and at the same time the body that it's exhibiting this one is never the person that person is never encountered as a subject of rights anyway so that's I think that's the predicament from which we have to begin to think because we still think that okay it is the humanizing so if only if only we would recognize that humans if only they would ever not not shoot on site site site assuming that that we are criminals whether criminals as terrorists or drug dealers right if we keep this and and and never it will never happen because the very the the the whole the whole formation is is built and supported by by the fact that that we are not human that no matter how many evidence you show it's never going to be taken as evidence right it's not even evidence and I think and I know that that doesn't doesn't give doesn't give away out in terms of how do we address what's happening now but I think it gives away towards designing something else and and I'm so afraid that the designing something else would that's something else would basically be structures for enabling the continuation both physical and intellectual and spiritual in spite of the state in spite of the institutions so I think that's where I that's what I get at you know as I think about the situation in Gaza and Palestine now in the situation in Haiti right now in the situation in Sudan and the situation in the neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro which you know all those those places in different ways more or less which are sometimes are visible many times are not visible but where these ongoing deployment of total violence it's always there whether it's low intensity or high intensity has been there for for such a long time so to me when I when I say we have to thinking has to begin with violence is there where you know it's there in that moment which is in the moment of impossibility the moment where every every tool that we have at our disposal is absolutely useless and yeah anyway so yeah please thank you so much Sandy Alessandro Denise for your talks and you know it's like almost painful to have to engage the slow temporality of academic work in this context of a crisis and and so it was really appreciative of this model that your work offers of practicing and ethics of engagement I'm going to try and maybe put both my questions together in the interest of time Sandy Alessandro I'm really struck by how in your work in the in the refugee camp the first kind of battleground is a battleground of language and you confront that in your work in in this you know in this word of the permanent temporary this this contradictory word but then it was also interesting enough in in in these other ways that meaning is transformed that that you brought up in the talk it went when you presented the work today you know the the context the idea of a neighbor what is that all of the public private all of these things change meaning first in the refugee camp so it almost seems like a machine for altering meaning but what's sort of interesting about it I think in in your work is this kind of dialectical mode that you have recognized by which the colonial mode itself operates which is that it speaks one language but it means another and it is really the position of the subaltern that recognizes that that that use of language you know that that kind of turn a phrase and so it speaks to two different it speaks in two voices at the same time and so I've you know it made me think about the kind of paradoxical positionality from which you yourselves had to develop a kind of language with which to practice architectural production you know with which to create the idea craft a practice itself and I was and you know looking at your work I was imagining what kinds of constraints you may have had to confront to shape this kind of iterative recursive model of making an architectural practice a decolonial practice that you have crafted in what I wouldn't you know call a kind of broken infrastructure of what world building and so I my question is you know how how does one in this context of being compelled almost produce a kind of decolonial practice from within a colonial epistemology and so you know a little bit to connect it to the question I had for Denise which is also a question of how to craft a practice again here you know when you talk about the street and then some of your other work you've talked about the house they have these multiple meanings. A meaning of it's you know an economic object it's a political object it's a symbolic object and it was it really struck me today how the street itself occupies these. meanings that confront each other. And so it feels to me that in your critique, you are describing this modern political subject, but in your artwork, you are trying to put that subject into crisis. And so, you know, the, the kind of content of my question is about crafting a practice that can put this space into crisis or put this condition of non coincidental needs that function to create a kind of subject to which to which the. How did what was the phrase you used you that is subject to criminalization but it this kind of regime of natural law does not extend to them. It seems to me that in your art practice, particularly, you really, especially with that word confrontation you want to put it into crisis. Particularly because you know we're sitting in here a space in the kind of pedagogical context of where students are really trying to craft that kind of practice maybe you could speak to that a little bit. Thank you. I mean, let me begin with with saying that indeed, maybe the first realization that we had coming in Palestine and and not having skills to do so is that we realize that we have been trained in a colonial. In the cities and structures right and and the dictionary that we were taught where a dictionary that is representing one frame you know right right in some way. I also realized that a certain point that I myself I mean we speaks about ourselves as the colonial. That have been oppressed yet. I think that the moment that I was sent to study architecture in Italy the idea was that I go study modern architecture and return back to civilize my community right so in that sense, the moment that we are architects think that we are the civilizers of the world by doing so we are actually supporting colonization so in that sense we should absolutely create a new language for us to be able to decolonize and, first of all, also to realize and not to accept the fact that if we are bodies that have been raised as as colonized people that we have not that our mind has not been actually in some way colonize and and and so I think decolonizing the mind is the first act in order to decolonize architecture or decolonize anything else so we realize that we that the dictionary of architecture that we were bringing with us or that we studied and that is in our mind need first of all to be to be thought radically all all the major foundation through which we studied architecture was extremely to be questioned in order for us to be able to think decolonizing architecture and suddenly only the moment that we you begin not to take these words by granted and not to define it as as they taught you that you should define it. It is these are the first foundation to begin to decolonize architecture the moment that you begin to do so. You don't accept anymore to do architecture the way you do it normally and and in some ways so strange but projects comes alone in that sense projects comes as consequences the moment that you begin to decolonize your mind decolonize your vocabulary decolonize your dictionary and decolonize the words that you think what they mean because if we think that we know what private mean what public mean, and we apply this to all the situation, then this is a very colonial attitude a very colonial architecture right so in some way I think there was no other I would argue that there was no other way. But in order to think the colonizing architecture, if not by rethinking these vocabularies that are the foundation of that same architecture. The needs. Okay. Thank you for your question. Yeah, so I mean you kind of described what what I do. So, maybe I can, I can just say, I don't even know how to say it because it's the simple question but it's not because it's just by by doing but but for me it's crucial though okay so I can I can I can say something that makes sense by saying that I am I am what I'm interested in you know in. At the same time that I that I'm talking about library and and and the importance of taking taking the streets again as as this site for for confrontation right for staging confrontations with the authoritarian aspect of the liberal state which is always there. We usually, you know we tend to identify it only with fascism but fascism is not separate. It's dead it is dead in the colonial in the in the deployment of colonial to like Israel's now but it's dead here and they were operating in different ways and everywhere so once once we we we are still accept that that authority is there. Then before before it. The most appropriate political response is is is rebellion. Right, but then, but also if we think of this the the epistemic and onto epistemological enclosures that are the tools we have like as Sunday was saying the terms the concepts we use, then a non confrontational practice is one of undermining them. However, it's possible. So, one of the things that I will I usually do is to play with the different meanings of the words as you are saying, I love and use and usually usually I'm interested in the most art cake. The one that is not used because usually that one holds something that cannot be immediately captured with the you know in the in the current grammar and then, and that can be you know deployed in. I think I'm going back to give us question about refusal right, because it is it is the refusal to to to. It is not the refusal, not only the refusal as no I'm not going to go there only but also refusal in standing the stage and refusing to perform that what is expected. You know, and these and those are metaphors but but I think at the same time, they hold some something that we can take to to the academic practice itself. And then also towards, you know, undermining certain certain separations, such as the one between, you know, the artwork and and and the text, I was opening an exhibition, like, last month, and then somebody we were doing a conversation with Arjuna and myself, whatever, and we were talking about the film, and then somebody in the audience asked, if we had the book that could, they could read because we are talking about all those things so maybe you have a book and we can't possibly have a book that book would have 1000 pages or maybe a million pages, what the film allows us to bring can never be written. This is a good thing, right, that that they can be there at the same time at the same time be separate but yeah. I think that this is an inadequate answer but and maybe if I made that very quickly and indeed to Denise is that I think that we, we should both undermine certain concepts but also actually add to a very for example you know working in a place like Palestine. Where verbs like neighboring and hosting has a complete different meaning they are still what constitutes society right it's not the same in New York, it is not the same in Stockholm right I mean in societies where modernity has been the base and capitalism has been the base concepts like neighboring and hosting are not anymore valuable in some way or even have almost no meaning and no thoughts in building the city, while in a place like Palestine you cannot think the city without thinking these two practices so it's also extremely important to add and think the city is departuring from these practices and and by doing so we are actually thinking the the colonial in that sense. Maybe this is a good moment to open it up to the audience I also wanted to ask you if you have questions for each other. Please, please let us know as well. Any questions from the audience. It seems to me. I remember that I sat in this auditorium. Many, many years ago but once I was here after the 10th anniversary of my 11. And there was discussion about that. And there was also a conference here on manifestos during the Occupy movement. And it seems that we're, we have reruns of the same issues, which are now being magnified in which the Chinese person who studied here. I remember the only course that I took on Chinese architecture was with class heretic and talking about. I appreciate your comments that we've all been colonized. When I, when I was at Qinghua University teaching there. I remember that it's foundations for the both arts. And this, this, this colonial model is just prevalence be going on for so long. But interestingly, the Middle Eastern leaders were just in Beijing with Xi Jinping, it was Xi Jinping banned skyscrapers. And there's nothing about like what Secretary of State Blinken said, you know, this Ukrainian is really conflict is really all about going against China. Well, trying to ban skyscrapers, even if Ukraine and the Palestine is rebuilt. What is it going to be rebuilt. I wrote the book disfiguring. And this is what we're talking about the disfiguring and what Edward Said, who was a professor here when I taught here about orientalizing, and how we view other people's bodies, including women and children, but we seem to be recycling the same old issues. And we can't get out of this Western versus everybody else Judeo Christian. And I was just with Nadir to Ronnie, who was at Cooper Union, who ran into problems, because he was Iranian, but also he tried to expand the analysis of research studies on what buildings to look at. And we have this complete orientalizing occupy 911 war and terrorism and keep that going. Please respond. Maybe I can very quickly try to respond, you know, I still remember when when we were in negotiation with at that point it was actually the government of Hamas that we were in negotiation with for the rebuilding of the neighborhood in Gaza and you know I still remember they showed images of Lee Corbusier and the towers that Lee Corbusier was doing and they were saying, this is the only I mean we should absolutely only build in this way because this is the only sustainable way that we can build in Gaza. Well, if you move around in Gaza and see how people have the ability to build together among themselves the sustainability they created if they have to add a wall they negotiate with the neighborhood that wall if they have to open a window that window is negotiated with the neighborhood if they have to do a square in the neighborhood it is collectively thought about and negotiated and yet the only model they had in mind is that modern model that separates everything that separates the street from the private from the public and that has nothing to do with Gaza yes because we are all colonized, we think that the only people we can refer to is what we are having in the universities departuring from the most colonial architect which is Lee Corbusier right so and we are still teaching him in our universities right so how can we even speak about decolonization today I would say how can we even dare to speak about decolonization today in western institutions. I can I can just just add another example of know why why we keep going back to the same place because we keep digging the same thing right we keep digging ourselves so I was reading a very interesting article by a legal a critical legal scholar. A black political scholar young of a new generation and and they make a very compelling argument about how it's, we should expand how Europe, the former colonizer should have an expanded definition of their borders so as to include the former colonized who are now migrating to Europe in search of a for a better life. And, and then the arguments made that this should be so because because they are interconnected they have been interconnected. You know, for hundreds of years now so why somebody from, I don't know Angola is not immediately taken as a citizen of of of Portugal, and they define it in terms of of political equality. I'm reading it's beautifully written like you know a lot of school can be very well organized and very nicely written. But, but like expanding the borders, right so of the nation state beyond the nation state but creating another figure like the nation state to bring together and then apply like but but then you're going to create another exclusion. So the solution for what to look at what's happening to, you know, migrants now, just in terms of expanding the borders for the of include for including and expanding political equality is that is that endless hole, out of which, you know, and then when we look at what has happened, for instance, in Europe, with this that the so called refugee crisis that Europe did not respond to the same, you know, excluding just to excluding but actually through criminalizing and creating for to protect its borders, right, that is something else that is going on the deployment of authority to not, you know, take something about the quality but anyway so the point is, we can't make those those those tools do work that they're not supposed to and many times we try we end up creating another yet another another and another dimension of subjugation so I don't know maybe with the with the designs, we should let go also of, you know, of the raw materials and the tools. So at that that exercise that I shared with the US precisely that just opening up a very little thing. So as you see okay so this is the thing that's operating and now how do we get how do we avoid bringing it back into a critique and then we create in the same, you know, creating the same situation again and again but any other questions in the audience. Oh, sorry, I'm Paul. Thank you sandy Alessandro and Denise I first of all really appreciated the engagement with this discussion of refusal, and I'm very interested in the relationship between practices of refusal and what practices of refusal in architecture might entail, and also the relationship between refusal and liberation. I can I can say because my answer is, is, is, I think it's short. Okay, so thank you. Thank you for the discussion because this question is never asked as straightforwardly as it as you just did. But it is always there. Right. And I think that that it may be that that the fusel is also it is also the fusel of. Yeah, of, of, maybe, maybe I shouldn't say it's a refusal but it is an acknowledgement of the limits of liberation, which in a way, you know, works in the same way as I was mentioning now the idea of political equality within borders, right. So, and that's because, because liberation, you know, it signals it signals the occupation of a certain position, which is only made that has only been made available due to a certain structure of epistemic colonial, you know, political symbolic symbolic violence that is modern thinking. So, but, but more importantly, maybe so as not to throw the, the, the, the bath and the water and the baby, maybe we can think of, of, of refusal as the everyday practice, as an everyday practice that opens up some space for, for breathing, let's call it liberation some collective space for, for liberation. So, because, because the idea of liberation, you know, you're always postponing, right, you know, it's always for, for some other time, some, some other moment, and there is so much sacrifice that it's involved in, you know, in that project in the meantime. In the meantime, we should, we should make sure that those who are fighting for liberation is stay alive to do so so we need to create space for breathing for existing. And when I say breathing is, you know, it's beyond just breathing for existing. So I think practices of refusal. If you think of refusal to die refusal to comply. If you think of refusal to obey have, you know, in my view, have to do with that with what happens in the meantime before liberation. In that sense, I will tell you what my body and mind lately, especially, you know, after living in Palestine and then when we move to Europe, and in somehow maybe because we began in Palestine we began a process of mind decolonization right. So returning back then to Europe, I realized that, for example, my first refusal was to be included. I mean, if there is a world that I hate in Western institutions is inclusion, because including you means that you are giving you are legitimizing that one frame right. So for me that is the refute to begin with because each one of us has to refuse what he understand in order to build something else right so now I am people are afraid around me when they say we would like to include you because because I am like it and I can I can really on them because it's not you cannot include me always and indeed in some way, one of the projects that we created and that we did not speak about is the living room project where we demand absolutely demand to be both host and guest. And the problem with Western institution is that they always want to host us and I have no problem with being hosted but hosting means power hosting means maintaining the control and if they don't know how to be guests because guests means that you have to trust others. And that you have to trust what they how they seat you what they feed you, and for a while you should lose control and I think for me, for example, one way that I liberated myself, at least within the spaces where I begin to live in Europe is to demand what I call my right to be a host right and to reject and refuse to be included and indeed you know, always I am asking what who is hosting me, it becomes a extremely important question so in some way I think we should choose our battles and we should undermine for me the liberation is also very very clearly is to undermine the one and only one Western dominant universal you know it's not universal it's Western but they make it universal so they can include all of us and I think this is a major refusal at this point of history. It's clear to me that that is what we need to refuse from other pose from our position where we are standing in this moment this is where we can support the place like Gaza by refusing only to be guests. We need to host and they should accept to be hosted in others people's narration. This is the only way that we began to crack the system and we began to have a moment of liberation. Oh, there's one more question. Thank you, everyone. I'm just thinking a bit about the question of refusal again and you mentioned the question, or you mentioned refusal to obey and also refusal to be included. And I'm thinking a bit about refusal in the context of a university simply put because we are here right now. And I totally agree with the idea that there are battles outside of here that seem to be a lot more significant or at least seem to be places where things could actually move. But in the context of this university. I'm thinking. I'm thinking of the hospitals of Gaza right now so I'm thinking of the schools the hospitals, the shelters that are being bombed by Israel and I'm thinking of the people in those buildings, managing to stay alive managing to keep each other alive. And the whole thing is extremely architectural. And I, I, in my process of anger and mourning I find it very difficult to understand how, how any of us can talk about anything but this sort of violent manifestation of colonial power happening inside those buildings and so I'm thinking of refusal to speak about anything else but this right and if if you could both comment on this and again this isn't a critique of anyone here. I think it's something we're all thinking about and so I'm curious about ways in which you're confronting that thought and that dilemma. Thank you. You know I can't I don't have an answer because it has been I have to say we have been three weeks that we are debating and and each time we have an invitation it's becoming really hard each time we have an invitation we are should we refuse or should we go this is this is the interesting is there even space to speak beyond what is going in Gaza right now and I have to admit that in our case we stayed for the first two weeks we shut down ourselves completely and we were in front of the screens unable to do anything else if not being it feels like another time where we are back in a lockdown right and at a certain point we decided to go for a long university place where I feel home and I feel a little bit protected and we both of us had a lecture and we decided to go there. And in some way you know I have been in London University for the past five years, and I have never felt that the students and the faculties has such high attention to what we are talking about like in this period. So I mean I am I'm a little bit thinking should we still be each one doing his own battle I mean also to think about you know we were while we were refusing Columbia and in that sense you know we have been in contact with so many people why we are refusing. We are also building a movement of you know we are building upon the architects and and planners against appetite in order to build a larger movements of architect for us to think the colonization together and this is both. Actually, in some way I think that we have, because we are not under the bombardment in this moment, we need to do our task we need to begin to undermine the places that are still in first place giving legitimacy to continue bombarding Gaza this is what we can do this is, you know we have to admit that we got inside our houses, close our door and sleep safely in the night. And if we are doing so, we have a task, we have a task to begin to actually held accountable all the architects each one in his own field in our field helped architects and planners accountable if they if they dare to build in a colonial situation I mean this is this is what we can do this is what we know how to do. And, and you know it's it's not that I am very sure of this I am I mean I am not sure even if us being here is still for whatever we are talking about how strong we are talking about how radical we are talking about. If we are only still giving legitimacy to Columbia University I would be extremely troubled with that right so in in that sense it's not. It's not I that I have an answer we we have been. You know, I mean I have even been speaking with my family and they say no I mean we should we know that the space to speak will be closing very very very soon this might be our last lecture in a place like the USA right but in some way. I think we still maybe need to speak or find our autonomous spaces to speak and use this moment to build that energy in order for us to create autonomous spaces from where we can undermine that one universal. That's the generation of of who we are and built our own vocabulary and and maybe encourage others to build their own vocabulary in this idea of the world having so many narration where we will meet at the threshold rather than all of us meeting inside one western sort of frame. I would just like to. To share what I also personally learned in refugee camps about refusal. To me. The most important political lesson working in refugee camps. It was how refugees for more than seven decades Palestinian refugees have refused to normalize. Their conditions of of refugees because you know the pressure was always to to abundance, you know, the idea of return to abundance, you know, the idea of. seek justice. For me the the great political lesson that actually is materialize in the architecture in the camp. Is is refusing you know to normalize an unjust present. Personally this was the most important lesson that I've learned and I always take it with me of refusing to to normalize. As it is, you know, in this very time that what we're witnessing is normal, you know, that can be acceptable. I refuse that. You know, I simply refuse that. And in the camp, I think that is so inscribed in the space itself also to to understand that how materially this is expressed by, you know, questions that from the beginning emerge. You should build after some years in exile, you know a roof so that single elements in the camp becomes so politically loaded, because if you build a roof means that you accept the fact that you've been expelled and you're going to stay there. Opening a door, all this kind of very simple architecture elements in refugee camps, they have a deep political meanings. And that to me has been always a very important lesson that I take it with me every time that apparently we move, you know, in the spaces of the city, thinking that this is our normal so that idea of refusing a normality I think it's a great political lesson. Yeah, this is your question and how do we, how do we, I think, well, I'm translating your question is how do we do what we do under under such conditions. I think my answer is you do it. It's impossible. It's, it's unbelievable that you are doing that work the work we, we are doing now it, and I'm, and I find myself doing now this is the, the teacher in me that says, Okay, we do. However, it will be it's not going to be the conversation that we would have had had what's happening not being happening. And yeah, we do it. And, and I say that I, I belong to the generation, both in Brazil and in the US to the generation that saw the arrival of cocaine and guns in the, in the inner cities and in the housing project. Now I was 131415 I started saying that my my classmates bodies on the streets killed killed by the killed by the police and, and, and, you know, and living under under under policing. And to me this is, this is the drive what drives my, my writing and I like to say that I belong to my generation, the only difference is that I, you know, I, I rebel in, in, in the intellectual work. But, but more importantly, of course, these, these moments right now, we may not be doing the work, you know, thinking more in terms of, of the academic court we do, but at some point, at some point something will come out and remember, I have this piece, nobody's, which it is, it is about something that happened that I never wrote, I've never written an academic piece about it. But then I wrote that piece only. So something happened in my neighborhood. In 2007, the, what the kids who work for the drug dealers they left the police come in, and then the chief killed three of them, they were eight, between eight and 10 year old. And then the police came at night to try to retrieve the bodies and I was home. I was already living, they were outside of Brazil, but I was home. And, and then for like four hours, I just, I just heard they like the, they use automatic weapons right so just this. And I just felt like I want to go underground because I don't know how, and then also not understanding how my parents and our neighbors and my family how they live in that because I've been living outside of that of Brazil for 30 years so. And, and then, and then the feeling that it should not be happening it should not be like nobody should go through it. That was 2007 2009 Israel attacks Gaza, and we are watching on TV, all these, you know, all the, you know, the bombs that the missiles and I'm, and I just, and I just think, oh my God how it feels like when all the sides and everything's shooting at you and there's no place to go. And so I wrote the piece that became the article nobody's. And, and I only, I was only, and it is about what happened in 2007 I don't mention it in the piece. I do, I have a this, you know, I'm passing mentioned to, to, to Gaza, but still, it's all there in that piece took me two years to three years to be able to write that out of my system. So, and then, but I write that out of my, out of my system not only in this exercise right so, but also towards for so it becomes something that others can use to for thinking other circumstances and not only. Not only that specific moment so yeah so there is it is it is an intense impossible moment. And I don't know maybe this is very personal but to me it translates into that impossibility becomes becomes almost an obligation to do something which is the thing that I know how to do so as you know whatever it is, the article the film whatever it is becomes available to somebody else for doing some some other, some other work. But maybe this is this more of an orientation than what it is but but the key to me that is the refusal to to comply and to to silence or or also the refusal to to say that it is what it is right. And also, going back to the question of visibility how do you, how do you write about the things that are happening in such a way as not to become, you know, evidence or a native informant and though then reproduce the same system of knowledge, whatever. Anyway, that is just to the work. On that note, I think. Thank you, everyone, for an important conversation. And I want to mention also that our next information will not be until two months from now January 22 we will talk about climate regimes with with Samia Hanny, Rob Nixon, with the response by by Ronald Martin and color easterling. I want to thank Alessandro, Denise and Sandy and Hiba and Dia for this conversation tonight. And thank you all for not refusing. Sign the sign the architects and planners against appetite if you're here I guess you you accept the fact that we at least have to maintain academics freedom protect our spaces, keep the battlefield alive and at the least call for ceasefire and stop of violence. Thank you.