The seminar will begin with the screening of the film A Moon for My Father by Mania Akbari and Douglas White, followed by a short presentation and conversation between Mania Akbari, Eyal Weizman, and Christina Varvia.

The seminar continues to explore the means by which architecture — as a contemporary set of techniques and as a body of knowledge — can become an investigative mode through which to interrogate contemporary politics and conflict.

Conflicts are urban phenomena, played out within dense media and data environments. However, political violence no longer focuses on the control of territories, but rather on the governance of population. From the use of tear gas to choke protestors, through to the humanitarian governance of populations in the global south, to the machine learning processes of facial recognition and biometric fingerprinting data (as recently seen in the suppression of the Hong Kong protests), the body is once again the focus of systems of government and control.

This series maps out the shifting landscapes articulated around the term ‘biopolitics’ and the ways in which it could inform architectural investigations. Each seminar – building upon the work of Forensic Architecture, its collaborators and friends – introduces a concept that bridges between architecture and the question of life.

This event is part of the Architectural Association’s series: Open Seminar – Evidentiary Aesthetics.