Into the Fault Zone
Nastassia Nasser
Current
Excavating the Architectonics of Occupation: Over the last 30 years the fault lines of geopolitics have sprawled. During this period the entanglements of ecological, military, financial and social violence indicate both a global crisis and the territorial conditions that dictate the way the Earth remains occupied by systems of globalisation. In a situation of so called ‘polycrisis’, of intertwined resource disasters, my research investigates the local conditions in which a (para)military perception of space becomes a generalized spatial practice of governance. Using architecture as a method of investigation, my research explores the social afterlife of occupation in one particular ‘fault zone’ : the Anti-Lebanon mountains. Tracing the Lebanese border between Syria and Israel, this place gives us a new outlook on the way military occupation establishes the permanent conditions of a society. From this perspective, my project has three strategic aims (1) to unearth the systems which enable a persisting logic of occupation; (2) to survey the way the social, sensuous and psychic life of power is grounded; (3) to rethink the social role of building in a landscape of spatio-temporal volatility.