Júlia Nueno Guitart is an engineer and researcher focused on the intersection between digital infrastructures and emergent, resistant, or disappearing communities. In her practice, she challenges dichotomies of virtual/real, technical/natural, and human/non-human, merging activism and bottom-up design processes to intervene in the structures that shape life and living space. Her doctoral research project, Digital Autonomia, explores forms of data commons that can be used to reinstate agency in algorithmically determined environments. She holds a master’s degree with distinction from the Centre of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths and a BA in Energy Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.
Júlia is the recipient of the Forensic Architecture: Open Verification (FAOV) PhD Fellowship 2023.
Runa Johannessen, PhD, Associate Professor at The Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation. Focuses on the territorial instrumentation of architecture in sites of societal transformation and conflict. Runa’s PhD thesis, Unliveable Spaces – Architecture and Violence in the West Bank (2018), investigates the inscription of violence of Israel’s occupation onto Palestinian land. Runa is currently pursuing the research project Habitats of Extraction, exploring how green colonialism and extraction of natural resources forms and frames landscapes and architecture in the Nordic Arctic and Sápmi. Working at the intersection of architectural, cultural, and societal analysis with methodological influence from artistic practices. Teaches the MA program Architecture and Extreme Environments at RDA.
Dr. Rona Sela is a curator, researcher of visual history and culture and lecturer at Tel Aviv University. Since 1996 she has researched the history of colonial Zionist/Israeli photography and archives, women photographers in Palestine/Israel, Palestinian photography, the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, colonial looting and plunder, archives under occupation, Palestinian photography and Nakba images/Palestinian visual history in Israeli archives; visual representation of conflict, war, occupation, exile, immigration and human-rights violation (Sela 2000, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018). She examines how the visual sphere of Zionist and Israeli colonialism, as one component in a huge mechanism, has been exploited and used for political and ideological objectives since the beginning of the 20th century. Sela exposes the various means of force used by Israel to seize/loot Palestinian archives/treasurers, the way Israeli national/colonial archives have become a large reservoir of knowledge and information about the Palestinians, and Israel's control over knowledge and the writing of history. In her work, she raises questions about the role of archives, archivists and researchers in colonial regions and zones of conflict.
Sela deals with methods to crack colonial patterns by various means such as archival practices - building post-colonial/de-colonial archives (2009, 2012, 2015,2017), or through activism by civil society. Sela's work (2013) discusses the development of Palestinian civil society – among them artists and activists - who fight to reduce inequality and apply democracy to all residents of the state. These artists and activists struggle over housing, planning, education and budgets, and insist on exposing Palestinian history and the Arabic language, which were erased intentionally from the public sphere. Sela studied the role of civil activism as a vehicle for change. She also studies the visual historiography of marginalized groups. She has curated numerous exhibitions and published many books, catalogues and articles on these topics.
Dr. Sela initiated and founded the first library dedicated to local photography at Beit Avi Chai in Jerusalem, is a lecture at Tel Aviv University, and the initiator and chairperson of the nonprofit Center for Research and Preservation of Local Photography. She also lectured at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and at Hadassah College. Dr. Sela was chief curator at the Haifa City Museum, Curator of Photography at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and has curated and researched many exhibitions. At the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Dr. Sela's main emphasis was on exhibiting international artists who represented the essential change that occurred in photography from the seventies and the social political interest in postmodern photography - a new direction for the museum. Dr. Sela has published books, catalogues and many articles and essays.
Nassim Rousset is a Palestinian-Tunisian-French-Canadian scientist that volunteered in the Israel-Palestine Amnesty International coordination of Quebec in Canada since 2006, before he moved to Switzerland in 2017. Like most Palestinians, becoming backyard experts on the Palestinian perspective of the History of Palestine is a form of resisting the disappearance of Palestinian culture. His talk combines several perspectives into a unique perspective:
- A Palestinian perspective: through the works of several academics (Rashid Khalidi, Walid Khalidi, Ilan Pappé, Jan de Jong, Vincent Lemire, Raz Segal, Benny Morris, Ami Gluska), activists (Visualizing Palestine, Zochrot, Palestine Remembered), and first-hand sources (Gaza Health Ministry, the stories of other Palestinians).
- An International perspective: through the lens of UN bodies (UN SC resolutions, UN GA, UNRWA, UN HRC, ICJ, etc.) and Human Rights NGOs (Amnesty International, Addameer, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, etc.)
- A personal perspective: through the stories told to him by his family, from survivors of the Nakba in Tulkarem who were expulsed during the Naksa, and from his family’s knowledge of the Palestinian diaspora in Tunisia.
His experience embodies what we want to show with this event.