Body PoliticDiploma 3

2019 - 2020

The term ‘Body Politic’ can be read in two ways; it refers both to Rousseau’s concept of the collective body of citizens that together form a state; and to the ways in which the individual body is policed and politicized whilst subjected to state decisions.

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Body, Space, Governance

In a strange circuitous loop, architecture —preoccupied with the dimensions, proportions and movements of the human body— has ended up not only facilitating, but also designing the very body it builds for1. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley argue that as humans design their physical environment, they also have to adapt to their own creations, in ways which change their behaviour, habits, and by extension their bodies. From Vitruvius to le Corbusier, from the Frankfurt kitchen to the International Space Station, the human body has always been at the centre of architectural design. Yet it is surprising how little it is considered in terms of its variation. Da Vinci, Le Corbusier, and Neufert, amongst others, have obsessed over establishing standard dimensions and proportions to aid design. By doing so, they inadvertently promoted the relevance and comfort of some bodies over others.

The definition of a universal body inevitably leads to exclusion. In her book, Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez lists countless examples of gender bias in design: from police stab vests that don’t account for breasts, to smart phones too large for women’s hands, to CPR mannequins or car crash dummies that test the protection of average male figures2. The exclusion of bodies leads not only to inconvenience but very often to increased risk for those who do not fit the standard.

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The human body often upheld as sacred, can also be simultaneously treated as a parasite, excess matter, or a commodity. The human rights project, although seemingly fundamental and obvious, is not straightforward at all. To create an equal treatment for all, institutions first have to define what is considered as all. The challenge of the commons starts from this very definition. “We the people”3 form constitutions, laws and courts of arbitration – but who does the commons include and who is left outside? Rousseau’s concept of the body politic4 —the collective body of citizens that together form a state— aligns the interests of an individual with those of the state’s administration. Yet there is an imbalance between the power that government exercises over human lives and the ways in which people can hold the state accountable. The challenge of representational democracy is within this tension. Following Foucault’s formulation of biopolitics, political power fundamentally consists of the power to ‘kill and let live’ and in reverse ‘make live or let die’5. Governance is thus the administration of bare life. And the human body becomes a mirror of the power dynamics that it inhabits. It is in the event of conflict, when the underlying forces that determine civic life erupt in violent expression, that one can observe the relationship between states and citizens, and the value placed on human life.

Of course these biases do not originate within the realm of design, they are inherently and profoundly political. The question of the body is fundamental to the question of governance and by extension to human rights. Which body/bodies deserve rights, and which become rightless? Which are recognised as citizens, and which are considered aliens or intruders? Which bodies have a voice in representational governance?

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Apparatuses

If the function of modern states is to administer life in its bareness, architecture becomes the instrument par excellence for the governing of bodies in space. Prisons, internment camps, and apartheid towns come to serve their bureaucratic role in segregation. Watchtowers, separation walls, and checkpoints control the flow of populations. Bodies are managed, registered, handled, and confined.

The necessity to administer life effectively and efficiently has led to the invention of a plethora of technologies for population control: from the use of tear gas to choke protestors, to birth control, facial recognition and biometric fingerprinting. The latest architectural trend of smart cities faithfully serves state power, by tracking, measuring, and policing bodies in space. All in the name of democracy, in servitude of the collective body politic. Rousseau’s analogy of the state as body has led to some horrific histories. The obsession with the “healthy body” has allowed authoritarian regimes to forcibly remove whole populations on racist grounds. “Expansionist Western medical discourse in colonizing contexts has been obsessed with the notion of contagion and hostile penetration of the healthy body, as well as of terrorism and mutiny from within. This approach to disease involved a stunning reversal: the colonized was perceived as the invader.”6 Colonial culture has strattified the human race to justify its extractivist intentions. Again and again, genocide occurs following the isolation of groups of people and their qualification as excess or surplus body matter. Eugenics, the practice of “bettering” human genes to avoid disease, mental disability and the mixing of a race, accounts for some of the gravest human rights violations in history. And yet this practice is long but forgotten; genetic testing and bioengineering exist today as part of everyday IVF procedures.

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Beyond Human

The more enmeshed technology becomes in human life, the more it challenges traditional distinctions between the human and the machine. Pacemakers, prosthetic legs, and plastic surgery create cyborgian fusions. And as the planet plunges into an age of anthropogenic destruction, the fate of humanity wholly depends on the survival of non-human life.

Protagoras once said: “Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not”7, testifying to the fact that since the invention of language, our knowledge practices have centered around a belief in human exceptionalism. From a material perspective however, the boundaries between the body and the external environment are not rigid, but rather they are density differences, changes in pH, bundles of frequencies, and particle formations. Bodies are highly networked with their ecosystems, dependant and reliant into systems of flows. As materials circulate the planet, our bodies are entangled with all sorts of substances, distant landscapes, and alternative creatures. These entities, connected and dispersed account for the more-than-human bodies that accompany our species in its galactic trajectory. As the reality of the climate emergency becomes more and more present, the connection of people to these natures and organisms becomes ever more crucial and urgent. The undoing of the nature and culture divide allows a new way of understanding the human body as a conglomeration of substances forming fleeting moments of consciousness amongst perplex relations with other organic or inorganic bodies.

Rather than the exploitative, colonial approach to nature so common to our species, what other ways of living can we imagine?

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Architect as Investigator

Within this framework, Diploma 3 will continue its quest in the intersection of conflict, media, and architecture, under the emergent field of Forensic Architecture.We will center our investigative work in the threshold between the physical body and the external environment that sustains it. We will observe and document the ways in which geopolitical forces leave their trace on bodies, and all the ways that bodies scorch the earth.

Our sites for the year will range between the collective bodies of citizens to the singular living cell, and all of the scales in between. Most importantly our work will question the aesthetics of representation across realms.

Historically, sculpture has informed the understanding of anatomy, while medicine demands the imaging of the body to discover the cause of illness. X-rays, ultrasound, MRI scans, angiograms and catheter surgical cameras, operate as investigative devices. Figures such as Camillo Gogli and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the fathers of modern neuroscience, needed to devise their own viewing devices to understand the complexity of the human brain. Their practice involved technological invention as well as constant drawing and analysis —they can be understood both as investigators and artists. In a parallel way archeologists unearth, reveal, document, draw, and piece together the artifacts that lead to the understanding of civilisations. Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig can reveal the ways in which our contemporary lives will be understood by the generations to come. We will learn from these investigative approaches and transfer these ways of seeing, into the built environment, performing time-based urban autopsies and against-the-grain political diagnoses. Our practice will be one of the architect as investigator, as an archeologist of the present, an expert able to read spatial signs and decipher recent conflicts.

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Devising original methodologies is the first step in investigative work. Thus the question of representation is key for us. The drawings in our unit will not serve the purpose of depicting something already known, but rather juxtaposing different datasets in order to configure our research questions. We will use models in order to simulate, test, evoke, reenact, and unfold evidence in space and time. Rather than simply representational, our models will be evidentiary and operative. They will have a function within the construction of an argument.

Propositions

Investigation does not mean solely research. Each project will articulate a proposition for an intervention.

From the individual to the population, from skin cells to satellite imagery, we will telescopically zoom out and investigate how complex social and political forces entangle bodies across scales. We will unpack these moments of rupture across urban and territorial lenses, and propose strategic interventions in the form of expert witness reports and media campaigns, new units of measurement or counter-master plans. These propositions will find ways to insert themselves into existing political discourse, and be activated within the institutions and forums currently at play.

Forums

When entering into political work, one quickly realises that there is no pure institution, no perfect politics. Similar to the challenges of representation, political action and advocacy is always messy, and very easily compromised. Institutions encompass the problematic attitudes of their respective statutes and members. Courts depend on the laws of the state and therefore reflect each government’s priorities that recognise the rights of some but not others. Parliaments can quickly be dominated by imposing figures and promote corporate

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interests. The press depend on their benefactors and social media interactions often spiral into hate speech or unfounded claims. Finally, art spaces can often host esoteric discussions, while absorbed by aesthetics that exploit the pain of others. The game of exposing injustice and reclaiming power is complicated.

But rather than fully rejecting these forums, in Diploma 3 we consider them as sites of action and intervention. We engage with political work consciously across multiple forums to make maximum impact. We create pressure by exposing our stories in the media, holding long discussions in art spaces and presenting evidence in courts when those channels are open. And when there is no right place to host our actions, we design our own forums to push through.

1 Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are we human? (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016)2 Ritu Prasad, “Eight ways the world is not designed for women,” BBC, 5 June 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-47725946 3 Constitution of the United States of America, Preamble4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Frankel, The social contract. (New York: Hafner Pub. Co, 1947)5 Michel Foucault, ” Right of Death and Power over Life,” in Biopolitcs:

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A Reader, ed. Timothy C Campbell and Adam Sitze. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013)6 Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” in Biopolitcs: A Reader, ed. Timothy C Campbell and Adam Sitze. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013)7 Attributed to: Plato’s Theaetetus, 152a

PROGRAMME

Group Investigation

We will jump-start the year with a group investigation on a real active case. We will partner with a human rights organisation and analyse footage, testimony and otherrelated material that describes the events under study. Unit members will take different investigative roles and conduct a multifaceted investigation.

Open Seminars

The unit will be accompanied by a series of Open Seminars co-produced by Eyal Weizman and titled Evidentiary Aesthetics. Each of the seminars — building upon the work of the Forensic Architecture agency, its collaborators and friends — will introduce a concept that bridges between architecture media and conflict, and the politics of bodies. The seminars will present both a theoretical underpinning as well as a presentation of investigative practices to draw on across fields.

Technical Workshops

The unit will lay its foundations on strong technical workshops on time-based media. We will frantically learn new software and re-appropriate it for investigative and exploratory purposes. Each project will need to determine its own graphic language, tools of investigation and its own means of representation. We will rely on no templates.

The workshops will run on all three terms and will include 2d and 3D animation, motion capture, compositing, photogrammetry, GIS, and gaming engines.

Book Club

The unit will also run a book club / writing class, on terms 1 & 2, offering selected weekly readings that the students will ask to respond to, in writing. This literature review will form the basis for the thesis.

Environmental & Technical Studies

When investigations are submitted as evidence in courts they have to be accompanied by a methodology report and to adhere to the most rigorous standards. In our case, ETS5 will take the form of a scientific report. The study will be fully integrated within the unit and will follow closely each investigation from its inception. ETS5 will be an opportunity to deeply interrogate the technologies that are referenced in the projects.

Term 1

Term 1 will begin with a Group Investigation into a current conflict. Students will be required to work together for three weeks to produce a body of evidence. Technical Workshops will assist the production of a collective video investigation.

At the same time, each student will define their individual interests, through taking a reading of current affairs, through Articles. We will study the aesthetics of representation by analysing Imaging techniques and combine this reading with the study of Theoretical Precedents. These two exercises will later lead to the writing of a Book Chapter that will articulate each student’s stance on the relationship between body, imaging, and investigative techniques. The book chapter will later both feature in the final Unit Book, as well as act as the introduction of the thesis.

Students will assemble Case Files by scoping the active agents and discourses that circle their selected themes. We advise that the chosen conflict comes from a context that each one can relate closely to, or can gain access to. Term 1 will also include the creation of an original Animation, to compose and depict a small aspect of the individual investigations.

The term will end with the first articulation of a Proposition, which will begin to imagine ways that each project can be activated and make claims within the selected context. The Book Club and Open Seminars will run through this term.

Term 2

Term 2 involves the full investigation and composing of the Proposition.

The term will focus on establishing a Methodology and employing it to activate a body of work. We will ask students to formulate an investigative technique, and to create Operative Models. These could be 1:1 mock-ups that will act as stage sets for reenactments, they could be digital models used as interview devices, scientific experiments and advocacy tools. 5th years will materialise these efforts in the Environmental & Technical Studies that will take the form of a methodology report.

We will ask for each project to exist in the world beyond paper and insert itself in to existing political discourses. The Proposition would need to be dialectical with the agents, organisations and institutions that are active in the selected area of study, Each project will form Allies and Adversaries. It would also need to be deployed in a chosen Forum or across multiple Fora. The form that the proposition will take would need to be tailored to the audiences it is destined for.

Unit readings and Open Seminars, will continue to help develop the thesis on this term.

Term 3

Term 3 will be about the final synthesis of the investigation into a concise format. It will involve the creation of a strategy for presentation, exposition, litigation, and advocacy. Aesthetic, media, and presentation choices will be tested and refined to serve the goals that each project has set forth.

Essays

- Michel Foucault, Right of Death and Power over Life- Hannah Arendt, The Perplexities of the Rights of Man- Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics- Paul B. Preciado, My Body Doesn’t Exist- Donna Harraway, The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse- Hito Steyerl, How to Kill People: A Problem of Design- Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: The Figures and the Tactics- James Corner, The Agency of Mapping - Thomas Keenan, Claims- Thomas Pringle, Photographed by the Earth: War and Media in Light of Nuclear Events- Robert Bailey, Unknown Knowns: Jenny Holzer's Redaction Paintings a nd the History of the War on Terror, - Yves Winter, Violence and Visibility- Sandra Harding, Strong Objectivity?: A Response to the New Objectivity Question - Carlo Ginzburg, Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm

Books

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract- Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population- Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer- Beatriz Colomina, Mark Wigley, Are we Human?- Christina Sharpe, In the Wake- Nick Axel, Beatriz Colomina, Nikolaus Hirsch, Anton Vidokle, Mark Wigley, Superhumanity: Design of the Self - Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto- Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception- Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others- Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish- Allan Sekula, Fish Story- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor- Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth- Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman, Mengele’s Skull- Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity - Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub ,Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

BIBLIOGRAPHY

- Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability- Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation- Anselm Franke, Eyal Weizman, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth- Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, Eyal Weizman, Architecture after Revolution- Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space- Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz, The Techno-Human Condition- Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline- Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics- Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy- James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future- James Corner, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape- Friedrich Kittler, Computer Graphics: A Semi-Technical Introduction

Artists & Projects

- Richard Mosse, Incoming- John Akomfrah, Vertigo- Cornelius Cardew, Scores- Eadweard Muybridge- The Long Now Foundation, The Rosetta Project: https://rosettaproject.org/ - Trevor Paglen- Rabih Mroué, Pixelated Revolution - Walid Raad / The Atlas Group- James Bridle, The Cloud Index- Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File: https://www.artforum.com/video/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen-a-fucking-didactic-educational-mov-file-2013-51651- Arthur Jaffa, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death- Adrian Piper- Akram Zaatari / The Arab Image Foundation- Michael Wolf: http://photomichaelwolf.com/- Edmund Clark: https://www.edmundclark.com/- Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig- Steve McQueen- The Otolith Group- Susan Schuppli- Lawrence Abu Hamdan- Decolonising Architecture Art Residency

Archives

- Ubu web: http://www.ubu.com/ - Pad.ma: https://pad.ma/ - The Internet Archive: https://archive.org/ - e-flux: https://www.e-flux.com/

Films

- Gillo Pontecorvo, The battle of Algiers- Mania Akbari, A Moon For My Father - Andrew Niccol, Gattaca- Avi Mograbi, The Reconstruction- Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne-Marie Miéville, Here and Elsewhere (Ici et Ailleurs) - Slavoj Žižek, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology- Michelangelo Antonioni, Blow up- Raoul Peck, I am not your Negro- Thom Andersen, LA plays itself- Adam Curtis, All watched over by machines of loving grace- Khaled Adbulwahed, Jellyfish- Laura Poitras, Citizenfour- Mike Figgis, Jeremy Deller, The battle of Orgreave- Harun Farocki, Serious Games- Armin Linke, Alpi- Eyal Sivan and Rony Brauman, The Specialist

Podcasts

- Longform: https://longform.org/podcast- Radiolab: https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/radiolab- More Perfect: https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/radiolabmoreperfect - Entitled Opinions: https://entitledopinions.stanford.edu/ - Still Processing: https://www.nytimes.com/podcasts/still-processing - Seeing White: http://www.sceneonradio.org/seeing-white- Caliphate: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/podcasts/caliphate-isis-rukmini-callimachi.html - Reply All: https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all

Unit Staff

Christina Varvia is an architectural researcher and the Deputy Director of Forensic Architecture. Her research concentrates on architectural evidentiary techniques and more broadly on digital media and memory. She has worked with multiple NGOs, published and exhibited internationally. She recently joined the Technology Advisory Board at the International Criminal Court.

Merve Anil is a qualified architect and has worked at numerous practices, based in London, Rotterdam and Istanbul, across a range of scales and methodologies, including as a researcher whilst at OMA. Merve graduated from the Architectural Association in 2014 and currently works for London based practice AHMM.

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