Eyal Weizman

Born in Haifa in 1970 and trained at the Architectural Association in London, Weizman is professor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, where he founded in 2010 the agency Forensic Architecture. Hollow Land (2007) is his major work on Palestine: the occupation is sustained not only by soldiers but by architecture, hilltop settlements watching the valleys, segregated roads, the wall, tunnels and a vertical space in which the subsoil and the air belong to one state and the surface, in pieces, to another.

Through the Walls, first published in 2006, told how the Israeli army read Deleuze and the Situationists to move through the houses of Nablus by punching holes in the walls, an example of how critical theory can become military tactics. With Forensic Architecture he has investigated bombings in Gaza, the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean, police violence in the United States and the Grenfell Tower fire in London, reconstructing events with three-dimensional models, phone videos and testimony and presenting them before courts and in museums.

His work, shown at Documenta and shortlisted for the Turner Prize, has created a new field between architecture, law and journalism, and has forced urban studies to look at the city as crime scene and as evidence. Critics dispute the mixture of art and evidence; the courts that have admitted his reconstructions answer for him.