Ungrounding

A devastating, meticulous account of the history of Israel's destruction of Gaza from an acclaimed architect and investigator 'Urgent and essential' DAVID WENGROW
'Extraordinary' ILAN PAPPÉ Eyal Weizman is one of the world's leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict and the environment, both built and natural. As director of the organisation Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers document acts of state crimes and human rights violations around the world. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice's genocide case against Israel. In Ungrounding, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the 'deep cartography' of the area extending from Gaza's subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, its unique soil, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable. Taking us through the broader geographic and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised - and how Israel's actions after 7 October escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide. Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, and illustrated with dozens of original images, maps and diagrams, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time.

Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where, in 2005, he founded the Centre for Research Architecture. In 2007, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, he established the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour, Palestine. He is the author of numerous books, including Hollow Land, The Least of all Possible Evils, Investigative Aesthetics, The Roundabout Revolutions, The Conflict Shoreline, Forensis and Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. In 2019 he was elected Life Fellow of the British Academy. In 2020 he received a MBE for services to architecture. He was the recipient of the London Design Award (2021) and the Mark Cousins Theory Award (2024). Forensic Architecture is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, a Peabody Award for interactive media, the European Cultural Foundation Award for Culture and the RIBA Charles Jencks Award. Eyal graduated with a degree in architecture from the Architectural Association in 1998 and received his PhD in 2006 from the London Consortium at Birkbeck, University of London.