Conceived for the 2026 World Congress of Architects, Earthworks brings together a selection of Forensic Architecture’s recent work on Israeli military conduct in Gaza, placing it into dialogue with Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal’s censored publication, A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, initially conceived for the 2002 World Congress in Berlin. Included works explore the relationship between destruction and construction in Israel’s establishment of military infrastructure for spatial control, with all new work on military earth berm typologies and a video based on Weizman and Segal’s original publication, digitised for the first time for this presentation.

Since the start of the ongoing genocide, Gaza has become not only a demolition zone but a construction site, reshaped according to Israel’s blueprint. Military bulldozers have ripped through the fractured remains of buildings and refashioned the debris into hundreds of towering earth berms—the modular building blocks of a new necro-architecture designed to keep Palestinians under perpetual siege and dismantle the basic conditions of life in Gaza.

With so much of the environment reduced to rubble, the earth assumes an almost liquid elasticity; a sea of shapeless dunes morph into various sites of military operation, as easily erected as they are erased. Berms are adapted into defensive barriers and configured into checkpoints, detention facilities, and military outposts, the calculated indeterminacy of these shape-shifting earthworks an implicit rejection of their status as architecture. Yet analysed over time, they acquire architectural legibility: as part of a spatial lexicon of occupation, fragmentation, and control, through which a more expansive and permanent military presence is gradually being inscribed into the physical and psychic landscape of Gaza.

Please check the UIA website for up-to-date opening hours. Our exhibition is located in the Three Chimneys venue on the basement level.

Post-Congress visitor hours:

3-4-5 July, 12:00–21:00 — Free access.

9-10-11-12 July, 12:00–21:00 — Free access.

16-17-18-19 July, 12:00–21:00 — Free access.