Statement of Solidarity

As many of us have expressed individually in various channels, we are shocked by the collective punishment and unfathomable violence inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank. We write this statement in support of alumni, colleagues, comrades, collaborators, friends and their families living in or having connections to Palestine; but also, in solidarity with and in support of those that we don’t know or will never meet. There is, and there will never be justification for the genocidal violence inflicted on the people of Palestine, before or after the 7 October 2023.

We protest the devastating siege and destructive bombardment of Gaza as well as the deliberate criminalization and violent suppression of protest movements worldwide. Aid organizations have been blocked, hospitals and refugee camps have been erased. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or made refugees for a third time. A ceasefire was the lowest denominator, the minimum, really, the very least. It is absolutely shocking that calls for a ceasefire have been described as one-sided. The common grounds of humanity are sometimes inhumanely far off.

As a group of researchers and educators that aspires to critical practices, elastic solidarities, and life-affirming infrastructures, we condemn anti-muslim hate, racist agitation and occupation policies as well as anti-semitism, anti-semitic rhetorics, and the attempt to leverage positivistic definitions of anti-semitism to legitimate racist politics, also against Jewish people. We are committed to trans-local, borderless knowledge production that, to borrow the words of architect and educator Pelin Tan, extends beyond the familiar terrains of design to encompass questions like citizenship, institutionalism, borders, war, being a refugee, documents and documenting, urban segregation, the commons, and pedagogies which depart from social injustices that traditional design practices have wrought.

Transversal practice is nothing without a commitment to transgenerational solidarity—a solidarity that acknowledges the specificity of struggles and individual histories of oppression without being tied to, or foregrounding suffering. We stand with the people of Palestine as well as with those being targeted in Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Congo, Ukraine, Georgia, and other places that fall of our cognitive maps, recognizing that their struggles are often submerged thanks to the hierarchies of solidarity that corporate social media infrastructures impose. This solidarity extends to those under attack in our midst and the people that took these struggles to the streets in the places where we work, study, and live.

• The original post (October 2023), its updated version (November 2023), and this version were written by Helen Pritchard and Johannes Bruder, and is supported by Catherine Walthard, Jan Torpus, Moritz Greiner-Petter, Gillian Wylde, Tina Omayemi Reden, Matthias Maurer. We are committed to working on tools, practices and approaches, pedagogical resources to continue this discussion.