הרצאת הקולוקוויום - Development Aid and Orientalist Embodiments of the Refugees’ Tawteen Architecture
קולוקוויום
סמסטר א' תשפ"ג
ימי שני 14-16
מכסיקו 206א
2.1.23
ד"ר פאתינה אבריק-זבידאת
ביה"ס לאדריכלות
Development Aid and Orientalist Embodiments of the Refugees’ Tawteen Architecture
The lecture sheds new light on the Palestinian refugee’s resettlement from architectural and urban planning lens. It rethinks the economic and aid development projects and their relation to security and settler colonialism in times of ‘regional peace’. Treating the Gaza Strip as a group of historical concrete cities, the lecture focuses on the Israeli regional processes of modernization and development projects implemented between 1982 to the 1993 Oslo Accords. Specifically, the lecture discusses the theoretical gap in perceiving the refugees’ resettlement and highlights the ways in which the methodological tools and the epistemology of power in conceiving the Gaza Strip are in crisis.It argues the ways tawteen and rehabilitation fell into a disciplinary paradox in which developmental architecture fell captive to security violence. The lecture presents the encounters between the enduring legacy of aid as part of colonial economic development and the politics of humanitarian aid featured the Cold War decolonization dynamics. These encounters demonstrate the ways strategies and technologies of pacification practices transformed from the realm of warfare architecture to the cultural realm of architecture. Professional and scientific awareness of the aid global discourse, culminating with the compilation of aesthetic elements inspired by the postcolonial architectural models of the MENA region. This will reveal how the tawteen of the refugees, is a complex form of multiple development temporalities and a product of multiple centers of power.
Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat is an Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) and head of the lab of Spaces-in- Transition at the architecture department, in Tel-Aviv University. She is the co-founder of Zubiedat Architects Office. Abreek-Zubiedat finished her postdoctoral studies at the Institute for History and Theory at ETH Zurich (chair of Prof. Tom Avermaete). She earned a PhD with Outstanding Distinction in 2018 from the Technion-IIT, Haifa. Her research focuses on history, theory and criticism of architecture in (post)colonial contexts, with a focus on the global south colonial development discourse, aid and humanitarianism entanglement with forced movement and the manifestation of mobilities in the refugee camps. Her current research focuses on the architectural materialization of ‘wheat security’ in the Middle East. Currently she is working on her book with tentative title Architecture in Conflict: The Right to an Urban History of the Gaza Strip (under contract of University of Pittsburgh Press).
