courtesy of Eyal Weizman and Verso
The whole within which the stories move
Rotbard’s historical technique in White City, Black City is thus to put the content back into the drained white form; yet Weizman’s, in Hollow Land , is to convey the very emptiness of the form. He aims much less to tell a story than to give you a way of seeing the whole within which all the stories move. The book itself is assembled as what Weizman calls an ‘archival probe’, multiple essays and aspects held together by the title’s load-bearing metaphor. Its
coherence surpasses that of similar but more album-like efforts such as Léopold Lambert’s Weaponized Architecture . 4 Cities become containers for the barest of lives, domestic buildings exploded to let the soldiers flow as freely as the sewage; Palestinians fear ghosts in abandoned Israeli homes; and where previously ‘Jerusalem Stone’ was assigned in planning law to enshrine Israel’s national substance, it is allowed to thin to a facade. As a writer, Weizman has found a way to organize these disparate materials into a single ‘imaginary object’. 5 The book has become a kind of edifice. Its clarity lies in its openness to the bodily senses. Stills of Palestinians crushed into checkpoints, queuing eyes, settlers scoring the desert, and the sweeping arms of military commanders and civic planners are all given their movement in the larger whole of the written text. It is an impossible survey, compressing so much that is disparate across such a torn quarter of the Middle East. 6
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left: Queuing eyes
below: Crushed into checkpoints
all images courtesy of Eyal Weizman and Verso
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