Contributors
Malkit Shoshan
Jane Szita
Eitan Bronstein
Zvi Efrat
Andrew Herscer
Yakub Odeh
Samuel Groag
Khaldun Bshara
Craij Rassool
Lucas Verweij
Daniela Bellelli
Anil Korotane
RECONSTRUCTION OF MEMORY
The conference
FAST QUESTIONS
-What are the criteria for an ordinary environment to become a monument?
-If history is written by the victors; how can the heritage of the losers be preserved?
-How can the planning community address the political and ideological abuses of heritage?
Aiming at defining typologies of preservation criteria
...The essence of Zionism is the exclusivism of Ben Gurion. To be Zionist and to acknowledge the Naqba is a contradiction in terms...against the mythology of the Zionist project, Palestinian history struggles to be told,
to attain permission to narrate...
...an architecture academic and expert on war and architecture, admitted at once to knowing nothing of Israel or Lifta, but plenty about the architecture of political violence in the former Yugoslavia...Violence can be legitimized through the ethnicity of destroying certain kinds of architecture - especially religious types. This way, violence gains cultural meaning...
Destruction can be in the context of war; but there is also
violent destruction in peace time...
...For many, like Fatma Aqel, architectural violence did not end with the shelling of their Lifta homes and their forced exile from their ancestral lands. Aged 20, Aqel fled Lifta; five years ago, her (new) home was demolished. Our people are living from Naqba to Naqba...
...the planner...For many years conservation has been seen as a purely aesthetic matter, and the social aspect largely ignored – this is of course still the case in the new luxury-villas plan for Lifta. And, while there is little documentation of the Palestinian heritage, the Israeli project has, in contrast, documented itself exhaustively from the start, all its accounts jumping from biblical to Zionist times to show ‘proof’ of ownership, while avoiding all mention of the intervening Islamic period...
..Palestinian architecture is still a target for the Israelis...Palestinian conservation architects are forced to be pragmatic...We can’t afford to pay any attention to Unesco, nor can we concentrate on design – we can only adapt our solutions to the users’ needs. ..we’d never get money for conservation, so we ask for funding for job creation ...
..District Six was razed to the ground in the 1960s and ‘70s to create a middle class neighbourhood; its original inhabitants were summarily evicted. In the land claims that eventually followed, the museum project arose almost incidentally... District Six museum is both a memory project and a form of social mobilisation, a resource for the lands restitution process...
Contextualizing Lifta: a conference with a Lifta refugee, the Israeli governmental planner, Israeli and Palestinian heritage experts, international heritage-destruction-experts from the Balkans and South Africa