Design can lift some communities. But it can also subject others to live precariously, often at the same time.
Malkit Shoshan
Malkit Shoshan works at the intersection of design and activism. She is the founding director of the architectural think tank Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST). FAST uses research, advocacy, and design to investigate the relationships between architecture, urban planning, and human rights. She is currently the area head of the Art, Design, and the Public Domain Master in Design Studies at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU.
Shoshan is the author and the mapmaker of the award-winning book Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine (Uitgeverij 010, 2010) and the co-author of Village. One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise (Damiani Editore, 2014). Her additional publications include Zoo, or the Letter Z, Just after Zionism (NAiM, 2012); “Spaces of Conflict,” a special issue of Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal (2017); Greening Peacekeeping: The Environmental Impact of UN Peace Operations (International Peace Institute, 2018); and UN Peace Missions in Urban Environments (FAST, CIC-NYU, 2019).
In 2016, Shoshan curated the Dutch Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale with the exhibition BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions, which is the subject and title of her forthcoming book (Actar, 2022). In 2021, Shoshan won the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for her collaborative project Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip: Watermelon, Sardines, Crabs, Sand, and Sediment.
Her research and design work have been published in newspapers and journals, including the New York Times, The Guardian, NRC, Haaretz, Volume, Surface, Frame, Metropolis, and exhibited in venues including the Venice Architecture Biennale (2002, 2008, 2016, 2021), Bureau Europa (2012, 2020), Boijmans Museum (2017), UN Headquarters in NYC (2016), Experimenta (2011), Het Nieuwe Instituut (2014), the Istanbul Design Biennale (2014), the Israel Digital Art Center (2012), and the Netherlands Architecture Institute (2007). 