This event is open to the public and registration is not required.

In this talk, Léopold Lambert will present the multiple means through which he tries to articulate a discourse about the politics of space and bodies. The first part will introduce his work as the founding editor of The Funambulist, a bimestrial printed+online magazine associated to a podcast and a blog. This work is mostly characterized by the contents of the 16 issues (and counting) of the magazine, but also through the politics of its means of production  — whether successful or failing, the attempts to hold these means of production to an ethical standard than the one advocated in the pages of the magazine are crucial to discuss and debate. The second part of the talk will attempt to describe the argument around which Lambert's books and articles evolves: the idea that architecture is inherently violent and that this violence is necessarily instrumentalized by political forces. Finally, he will present two researches in which this argument finds an incarnation: the Israeli apartheid in Palestine, and the French colonial continuum between Algeria, New Caledonia and the French banlieues.

Léopold Lambert is a trained-architect, currently based between Paris and Philadelphia, editor-in-chief of The Funambulist (a magazine dedicated to the politics of bodies), and the author of three books: Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum books, 2015) and La politique du bulldozer: La ruine palestinienne comme projet israélien (B2, 2016). His next book will focus on a spatial history of the French state of emergency and the colonial continuum.

This talk is part of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Visual Studies Proseminar series organized by the Director of Visual Studies Charles Stankievech. Thank you to Sabrien Amrov in the Geography Dept. for assistance in organizing the talk.