Young Bauhaus Research Colloquium
Speaker
Data
Nabil Ahmed
CASS School of Art and Architecture, London Metropolitan University
Nabil Ahmed (PhD) is a researcher, writer and educator working on environmental conflict and forensic architecture. His writings have appeared in academic journals, magazines and various art and architecture publications such as Third Text, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg, 2014), Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence (Routledge, 2014) and Volume magazine. He has been part of the Anthropocene Project (2013–2014) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and is currently co-leading the project “Nature, Labour, Land” for the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennial. He is co-founder of Call and Response, a sound art organization based in London. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is a lecturer in history & theory at The Cass School of Architecture at London Metropolitan University.
Evidencing Ecocide: Towards an Ecological Justice in the Pacific Ring.
The Inter-Pacific Ring Tribunal (Interprt) is an interdisciplinary project for an alternative commission of inquiry to investigate patterns of environmental violence, their legality and their impact on sovereignty in the Pacific region from land based mining, deep-sea mining and nuclear weapons testing. Imagine a 40,000km long force field of earthquakes, volcanoes and mineral frontier under and around the Pacific Ocean that stretches from Melanesian islands to the Philippines, The Kamchatka Peninsula to the US Pacific coast, Mexico, Nicaragua and to the Andes. The project traces the Pacific ring of fire as an unstable and contingent frontier of human and more-than-human capitalist relations and propose the design of an alternative tribunal for ecological justice. With the position that architecture as militant research can reveal the spatial realities of mineral extraction, urban projects, and environmental violence in this paper I will present a series of spatial evidence based on human rights investigation data, corporate financial reporting and publicly available remote sensing imagery on the long-term conflict in West Papua, a Melanasian territory, as a case of ecocide perpetrated by the Indonesian state and transnational corporations through a program of mass killings, transmigration settlements, industrial mining and large scale land grabs.