'The Breathless' by Samaneh Moafi, Forensic Architecture
When:
—
Venue:
Online
Toxic clouds colonise the air we breathe across different scales and durations, from urban squares to continents and from incidents to epochal latencies. Using investigations of Forensic Architecture on the Beirut Port Explosion, the Fire at Grenfell tower and the Death Alley in Louisiana, this talk sets out to foreground toxic clouds as a shared condition of suffocation, and hence a form of commons.
Dr. Samaneh Moafi is the Senior Researcher at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London. She provides conceptual oversight across projects and in particular oversees the Centre for Contemporary Nature (CCN), where new investigative techniques are developed for environmental violence.
Dr Moafi graduated in architecture from the University of Technology, Sydney where she specialised in environmental urbanism in conflict zones. She earned her PhD, from the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture with a dissertation on the contemporary history of state initiated mass housing in Iran and the class identities and gender roles it informed. Her articles have appeared at the Architectural Research Quarterly, Journal of Islamic Architecture and the Avery Review among others.
She taught at the University of Technology, Sydney, and the Bartlett School at University College, London, and led courses at the Royal College of Arts and the Architectural Association, both also in London. She has lectured at the University of Edinburgh, Newcastle University, the Royal College of Arts, University College, London and the Architectural Association, and internationally at Columbia University (US), Purdue University (US), Piet Zwart Institute (Netherlands), École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Versailles (France), Kuwait University, and the University of Technology, Sydney (Australia).
Her work has been exhibited globally in forums such as the Manchester International Festival (2021), Storefront for Art and Architecture (2020), Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019), Tate Britain (2018), MACBA (2017), Venice Architecture Biennale (2016) and Gwangju Biennale (2013).
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Psychosocial Admin Team