Sideways Lectures at the Royal Academy of Art, School of Architecture, Copenhagen

My research takes a starting point in the configuration of Palestinian refugee camps; in its first instance, the spatial and material arrangement of the delineated territory of the camp. Through generations of existence, the intentionally temporal structure of the refugee camps has become permanent, evidently manifested as urbanized areas in a constant state of exception. The poor physical conditions are impossible to ignore. As an architect, the impulse to improve through material and spatial means comes natural, yet many questions remain. What are exactly the contents of the spatial configuration of a camp? In this lecture, I will discuss architectural interventions on the backdrop of political and violent conflicts, specified through refugee camps, in the framework of what has recently been coined as military and humanitarian government (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010). Humanitarian and military interventions seems to have conflated through the last decades, both operating on the same scene, thus obfuscating fields of aid and fields of battle. I will question if he practice of architectural interventions in contested territories might be sharing certain pitfalls on these fields, where a sustained temporal state justifies a state of emergency shown also on the spatial level within refugee camps.