courtesy of Eyal Weizman and Verso
Meaningful inscriptions
and compacting them together in a mostly verbal picture of human conflict. The explosions, though, are notional. The writer, and the architect and planner, as organisers of others’ material, in their dependence on others and each other, share a common ground. For our time, with so few meaningful inscriptions and so many modernist white walls, the edifice needs the book: ‘Undoubtedly this, too, is a structure, growing and piling itself up in endless spiral lines; here, too, there is confusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labour, a furious contest between the whole of mankind, an ark of refuge for the intelligence against another deluge, against another influx of barbarism.’ 12 f
Weizman’s book answers to these traditions, but inverts them both. A hollow object sits where an affirmative idea might have been expected. It is this hollowness which drives the Arab-Israeli conflict on and on. What is hollow, finally, is the soullessness and ‘insecurity’ of all enemy-defined nationalisms. Much inspired by Weizman, Penelope Curtis curated an exhibition about the Arab-Israeli conflict called the object quality of the problem . 11 The metaphor ‘object’ seems half-right to describe the overall unity of Hollow Land , but what sort of object is it? Curtis thought of sculptures, but artist Adania Shibli disagreed because ‘we are in the sculpture’. This sounds less sculptural than architectural. Weizman’s object is made of writing, exploding many buildings
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11 Penelope Curtis, The object quality of the problem . Henry Moore Institute, 2008. 12 Victor Hugo, Notre Dame of Paris : book 5, chapter 2. One thinks, of course, of Tatlin’s tower: see Svetlana Boym, The Architecture of the Off-Modern . Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. The original interpreter of the writing on the wall was – Daniel (5:17).
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