Discussion / “Conditions of Life, Calculated,” with Eyal Weizman and Sina Najafi

Date: Friday, 30 October 2026, 7–9 pm
Location: Giorno Poetry Systems, 222 Bowery, New York (directions here)
FREE. RSVP required
Co-presented by Cabinet and Giorno Poetry Systems

Article II of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide forbids, among other things, “deliberately inflicting on [a] group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.” The intent of this injunction is to address indirect forms of killing—the targeting not of human bodies but of the environment that sustains them. It has also proven crucial for retroactively understanding the colonial origins of genocide.

The term “conditions of life” encompasses the environment understood broadly in its entangled natural, physical, and, more recently, digital manifestations: land, forests, and rivers, but also agriculture, housing, hospitals, schools, sewage and water systems, electrical grids, communication networks and digital infrastructure, and social and cultural institutions. The intentional destruction or degradation of these elements may not kill instantly but it undermines a people’s ability to survive, leading to a slower form of decline.

In his book Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, Eyal Weizman considers this principle in the context of the current Israeli genocide in Gaza. Taking Weizman’s analysis as its point of departure, this evening’s discussion will examine genocidal violence more broadly, and the ways in which slow, indirect killings have more often been the means of annihilating Indigenous peoples even as direct acts of massacre have been, and continue to be, perpetrated in colonized territories across the world. Dispossessed of their ancestral habitats, separated from the land on which they have depended for sustenance and ritual, forced into reservations, Indigenous populations everywhere have been destroyed to free up the best land for European settlement. This necropolitical history will frame a conversation on the different velocities and modalities with which genocidal violence has been, and continues to be, committed.

About the Participants
Sina Najafi is the editor-in-chief of Cabinet magzine.

Eyal Weizman is an architect and writer based in London who in 2011 founded Forensic Architecture, a research agency that provides architectural evidence in human rights cases and war crimes trials. In 2007, he established, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour, Palestine. Weizman is the author of numerous books, including Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide (Penguin Press, 2026), Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Zone Books, 2017), and Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso, 2007). He is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where in 2005 he founded the Centre for Research Architecture.