13 September 2022

REUT YARNITSKY
UPenn Architecture

Respondent: Stephanie Savio, EPFL

The communal settlement of the Kibbutz has been extensively studied by architectural historians as the central expression of the Zionist settlement movement. However, while focused on the role of the kibbutz in the realization of Jewish nationalism in Palestine; scholars have overlooked the concurrent phenomenon of the diaspora kibbutzim, which emerged in Eastern-Europe during the interwar period. By exploring this phenomenon, I wish to expand, both geographically and thematically, the current discourse on the kibbutz, revealing a spatial organization significantly more radical and fluid than previously conceived. Dismayed by the renewed anti-Semitic sentiments, and growing political and economic instability of the 1920th, many young Jews in Eastern-Europe were seeking an outlet in Zionist activity. The Diaspora kibbutzim emerged out of spontaneous gathering of communes, who were inspired by the settlement movement in Palestine, specifically the kibbutz. However, while the establishment of the kibbutz in Palestine relied on mechanisms of landownership and colonialization, the settling system of the diaspora kibbutzim was based on an adaptation to existing built environments and communities. Each commune found local accommodation and workplaces in its hometown or nearby village, dispersing the kibbutz across different houses, apartments, rooms, and warehouses. This spatial adaptability extended beyond the single town, as the kibbutzim were constantly expending into different locations, creating flexible networks of communes throughout today’s Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus. Spatial practices such as multipurpose use of spaces and inventive methods of communication between dispersed locations, supported this mechanism. Consequently, unlike the closed institutionalized kibbutz in Palestine, the diaspora kibbutz functioned as an open non-hierarchical community, integrated and influenced by its surrounding society. I believe that retrieving this phenomenon back into the discourse concerning the kibbutz, allows to challenge its assumptions concerning colonialization, settlement, and nationalism, redefining the kibbutz as a diverse, expanding and transnational movement.

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AMALIE ELFALLAH
Politecnico di Milano + Fulbright

Respondent: Lahbib El Moumni, ETH/gta

In Fall 2021, Log—an independent journal on architecture and the contemporary city by Anyone Corporation—published Log53: Why Italy Now? The various contributions included journalist Mario Calvo-Platero's "Under the Blue Mediterranean Sky." As Anyone, Calvo-Platero narrated a vignette of Italian colonial architecture in Libya and praised the “multicultural” work of Italian architect Florestano di Fausto. After contextualizing the architectural works of Di Fausto, to whom we might ask Calvo Platero, was his architecture—in form or function—"multicultural?" Di Fausto's oeuvre spanned from urban to rural— the Arco dei Fileni marking the Roman crossroads between Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (1937), the Italian agricultural settlement of Villaggio Oliveti (1935-38), the Uaddan Hotel and Casino in Tripoli (1935), the Offices of the Istituto Nazionale Fascista per la Previdenza Sociale, INFPS (1938) in Libya; as well as the Padiglione della Libia in Mostra Triennale d’Oltremare (1940) in Napoli. His work—towards a “Mediterranean Vision" of colonial architecture—is exemplary in illuminating the ambiguous project of Modernization during Italian colonialism in Libya. This research presentation acts as a continuous conversation of my master's thesis (PoliMi, 2022) which partly examined cultural and historical geographer David Atkinson's analysis (2012) of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concepts of "bare life" and "state of exception" (1998). Atkinson asserts how the concentration camps in Cyrenaica (1928-1933) strike a clear application to Agamben's theories on “state of exception.” The camps—spaces of “pacification” (Graziani, 1932) or places of genocide (Ahmida, 2020)— thus cannot be separated from the integral step toward the construction of the modernist landscape in the late 1930s. The spatial qualities of the agricultural villages for Italian mass settlement, like Villaggio Oliveti (Tripolitania) and Beda Littoria (Cyrenaica), illuminate how modern architecture was instrumental in building a civilized Modernità masking the “[spaces] of exception.” Nonetheless, Log53’s space for "Under the Blue Mediterranean Sky" elicits reasoning why the phenomena of “colonial amnesia” exists in the 'Now.'

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