“As in all real cities, we have constructed mosques, a kasbah and even a refugee camp” Arick Moré, lieutenant colonel of the Israel Defense Forces

Baladia was built between 2005 and 2006 and paid for by US military aid. Baladia is one big dress rehearsal, or as described by Stephen Graham a “theme park for practicing urban destruction, erasure and colonial violence.” From the set to the actors’ habits and lifestyles, the mock city is a space where modes of social control are constantly being refined. As Baudrillard famously stressed, simulations are not just ‘copies’ of the real world, but hyperreal constructions – simulations of things that don’t exist - through which war and violence are constructed, legitimised, and performed. This research addresses the confusion between fiction and reality in the context of military training. A collection of Hollywood talent, academics, toymakers and game industry insiders assist the military in producing a shadow world. The military training site is a space of performance, rehearsal, and deception. It prepares us for new realities of war while shaping new urban geographies in which fiction and reality collide. The real is confused with the model. In this shadow world, architectures both elaborate and artful are easily reconfigured into Gaza, the West Bank, or Lebanon. In this proposal I run through selected scenes from the rehearsals at Baladia. Architectural inauthenticity is transposed onto desert landscapes, false fronts and stage sets contribute to the production of endless fields of repetitive preparatory violence.

This research examines 150 years of landscape transformation along the Biobío River in Chile, particularly the changes brought about by large-scale eucalyptus plantations and related industries. In this talk, I will present the river as a navigational device for the historical and geopolitical narratives that unfold within this conflictual history. The Biobío River basin has been destroyed and rebuilt more than three times since the Chilean state's 'pacification of Araucanía' campaign, a colonial initiative aimed at removing Mapuche communities from the northern frontier of their ancestral lands. Unlike other historical moments in the Chilean-Mapuche conflict, which began in the 16th century with the Spanish conquistadors, who used violent warfare, land confiscation and repression to subjugate and displace the Mapuche people, this one is not demarcated by forts and missionary campaigns, but by changing landscape conditions. The threshold of the plantation advances and retreats in response to colonisation, cultivation, displacement, industrial settlement and large-scale plantation projects. This thesis corroborates historical cartography, photographic archives and early 19th and 20th century travellers' accounts to geolocate them along the path and topography of the Biobío River and its hinterland. In this presentation I will present a series of drawings that explore the river as a narrative device that helps to reveal the complex entanglement of man-made landscape transformations and political conflicts. The eucalyptus tree and its plantation schemes are used as a protagonist through which to trace the settler-colonial plantation practicesthat have instrumentalised the landscape as a political tool in the hands of the Chilean state seeking to displace Mapuche communities from their ancestral lands in the Biobío River. Here, eucalyptus plantations are treated as colonial architectural projects. They are analysed, along with their associated infrastructure, in three historical moments, in three places, through three cross-referenced methods: mapping, archival analysis and writing. The sites, moments and formats shed light on the global causes of the landscape we see today.

In his book entitled Blowing the Whistle: The Politics of Sport (1983), Garry Whannel, made following statement: “The apparatus of the gymnasium, comprising exercise bikes, weight machines, jogging machines and ski-jog equipment, has begun to evoke the technology of the sadomasochistic brothel, specifically the rack, wheel, cross and cage.” Subsequently, the research  examines architecture as an optical instrument through which the emergence and contemporary manifestations of self-disciplining machinery have been manifested in the Global North, with a focus on the gymnasium type. The aim is to identify a tension between the architectural processes that shape bodies and the bodily processes that shape architecture. A series of exercise devises will be traced throughout time to provide a parallel reading of how these infrastructural utilities have shaped the self through the social staging of public spectacle. Through the presentation of archival drawings, photographs and protocols of use, the presentation will address social, technological and environmental issues orchestrated through ritual, protocol and convention of the body. The research will also serve as an introduction to my recently launched PhD by Practice framework, which seeks counter-readings of the theoretical framework by visiting selected practice-based projects, some ongoing and some recently completed.