Violence, Fast and Slow

Conflict is a large part of anthropogenic changes to our environment. Violence against the environment may be slow, indirect, and diffused, but it is enmeshed in colonial and military forms of domination.

In this exhibition, Forensic Architecture’s Centre for Contemporary Nature presents two large-scale investigations in Palestine, where the ongoing Nakba is exemplified by both the displacement of people and the transformation of the environment.

The two investigations are concerned with contiguous places, one in the Naqab, and the other in Gaza. In both locations, environmental destruction has become a means for the production of borders: in Gaza the environmental destruction is mobilised as part of the production and fortification of the border, and in the Naqab as a mode of weaponising the fleeting threshold of the desert. In both cases, incremental environmental destruction erupts into lethal physical force.

These investigations thus describe forms of destruction that are both slow and fast, expanding our ways of thinking about violence in the context of colonial domination.