Reading has been a key continuity in the flow of my life, a primary focus since I was a child enthusiastically bringing home armloads of library books each week.
Appetizer:
This is the first printed illustration of a rhombicuboctahedron, based on an original drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. It is in the book De Divina Proportione by geometer Luca Pacioli, which was created in 1509.
Eyal Weizman, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide
Very well narrated by Khalid Abdalla
Since October 7, 2023, I've been closely following the events in Palestine (see Broken Heart: Palestine, Gaza, the West Bank, Israel⩘ ). At the same time, I've been doing a great deal of reading about the history of this devastating conflict.
This book, more than anything else I've come across, has greatly expanded my awareness of the horrendous devastation that Israel is perpetrating upon the Palestinians, and has been for many decades. I can say only that I'm horrified and disgusted by the blatant and intentional disregard for human life with which Israel has been and is conducting what can only be described as one of the most grievous instances of brutal settler colonialism as well as among the worst genocides in human history.
Some context is important.
The author, Eyal Weizman, is a British Israeli architect. He is director of the research agency Forensic Architecture, at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and founding director of the Centre for Research Architecture at the department of Visual Cultures. In 2019 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy. He was born in Haifa, Israel, studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London, and completed his PhD at the London Consortium.
"Ungrounding" is one of the key findings of the forensic architecture that he and the team he works with have been performing.
Ungrounding is unlike other kinds of destruction in which the surface markings of inhabited areas – plot lines, roads, fields, gardens, walking paths – remain identifiable. In all other wartime destruction that I have studied, even when buildings collapse, one can still tell where they once stood, and understand something of the social reality that the urban surface held together. After a conflict ends, buildings and neighbourhoods can be extruded from their footprints. Ungrounding, on the other hand, aims to remove a society from its place and erase all traces to its previous existence. It extends from buildings down to the soil beneath them. It is a type of violence that is earth-shaping, terra-forming. Ungrounding is not a by-product of military confrontation but rather its aim. It destroys all conditions that sustain life and produces an empty slate, a tabula rasa. The monochrome desert of upturned soil is the material signature of Israel's genocide.
The book is extremely well researched and written, blending scientific findings and explanations, deeply personal stories of what has been and is occurring, and extraordinary insights into what the Israeli military and government have been doing, with the full backing of the U.S. government, over generations.
This was a deeply disturbing book to listen to and read (as I do with books that have complex subject matter, I followed along in the written book as I was listening in order to gain a more in-depth comprehension), but I'm deeply grateful for the insights and understanding that it provided me with.
Re-grounding: the soil's capacity to generate life. Thankfully, this book left me with one final and important insight: to never abandon hope that the future can be better.
Acts of ungrounding connected the expulsions and destructions of 1948 with those of the present-day genocide. The scraping of the surface sought then and now to make impossible the return of Palestinians. However, for those willing and able to look closely, through the vale of the total devastation, faint traces always remain. A close and careful reading of the ground, through a combination of memory and photography, testimony and material traces, as this book has tried to demonstrate, can reveal not only what exists, but also the subtle traces of that which Israel has attempted to erase. These faint markers are anchors for return. When such return will take place, a process of re-grounding must slowly restore the life-giving quality of the damaged soil and its capacity to generate life.
Very well narrated by Khalid Abdalla