Into the Fault Zone: Excavating the architectonics of occupation

Lead Research Organisation: Goldsmiths University of London
Department Name: Visual Cultures

Abstract

Over the last 30 years geopolitical fault lines of crisis have not only sprawled, the entanglements of ecological, military, financial and social violence, have become the operative conditions which underpin the way the earth remains globalised. And in a context of 'polycrisis', of complex intertwined resource disasters, occupying fault lines establishes the conditions by which a (para)military perception of space has become a practice of governmentally, blurring the lines between military and civilian organisation of daily life. In the midst of this conjuncture, this thesis looks at the Anti-Lebanon mountains (border between Lebanon, Syria and Israel) to excavate the spatial conditions which have made this possible. This research navigates occupation not just as a warfare technology ,but as a set of protocols that produces high-risk spaces, hence, high interest-bearing capital. How these logics permeate sense perceptions, psychic life as well as the earth itself, remains under-researched, yet crucial as this gives answers as to why occupation becomes a permanent solution to a chronic problem. By researching the afterlife of occupation in this region, I consider how the occupational logics keep on operating on the way we inhabit space. If space has become the instrument of occupation which ends only to become everything, to be everywhere, my research proposes a very different notion of reconstruction.

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