In 2005 Malkit Shoshan initiated FAST with Michiel Schwarz, Willem Velthoven and Alwine van Heemstra. The urgency to create FAST began with a question posed to us by a Palestinian community of Internally Displaced Persons, Ein Hawd. The community needed a planning alternative to the one imposed by the Israeli government. They wished to have a masterplan, with which they could negotiate with governmental bodies and claim access to civic rights and services.
At the start of the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory, the founders decided to address the role of architecture in times of crisis. The first project, One Land Two Systems, focused on Ein Hawd. After One land Two Systems many projects, publications and exhibitions have followed.
Malkit Shoshan is a designer, researcher, and writer. She is the founding director of the architecture think-tank FAST: Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory. FAST uses research, advocacy, and design to investigate the relationships between architecture, urban planning, and human rights. Its cross-disciplinary and multi-scalar work explores the mechanisms behind, and the impact of systemic and spatial violence on people’s lived environments and livelihood. FAST develops collaborative initiatives and designs that promote social and environmental justice.
Shoshan is the author and the mapmaker of the award-winning book Atlas of Conflict: Israel-Palestine (Uitgeverij 010, 2010). The book details the emergence of Israel and disappearance of Palestine over the past century. It visualizes issues of settlement distribution and typology, land ownership, landscaping, water and access to resources in a state of conflict. Shoshan is also the co-author of the book Village. One Land Two Systems and Platform Paradise (Damiani Editore, 2014). Village consists of multiple narratives that recount the story of an internally displaced community in Israel and shows how Shoshan designed a collaborative engagement process to produce an alternative masterplan for the village. This masterplan served as a tool to negotiate the community’s right to spatial equality and state services with the local authorities.
Additional publications include Zoo, or the letter Z, just after Zionism (NAiM, 2012), Drone. UNMANNED. Architecture and Security Series (DPR-Barcelona, 2016-2018), Retreat. UNMANNED. Architecture and Security Series (DPR-Barcelona, 2020), the issue Spaces of Conflict for Footprint, TU Delft Architecture Theory Journal (JAP SAM Books, 2017), Greening Peacekeeping: The Environmental Impact of UN Peace Operations (The International Peace Institute, 2018), and UN Peace Missions in Urban Environments and the Legacy of UNMIL (FAST, CIC-NYU, 2019).
In 2016, Shoshan was the curator of the Dutch Pavilion for The Venice Architecture Biennale with the exhibition BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions, which examines the spatiality and legacy of UN Peace Operations in conflict-affected urban environments. The exhibition will be the subject of her forthcoming book BLUE: The Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions (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.
Shoshan studied architecture at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and the IUAV – the University of Venice. She is currently Area Head of the Art, Design, and the Public Domain Master in Design Studies at Harvard GSD and a visiting scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU. In 2015, she was a visiting critic at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture.
Since 2016, she taught the following courses at Harvard University Graduate School of Design: Architecture of Peace, Spaces of Solidarity, Exhibit: Designing for Decentralization, Forms of Assembly, Interdisciplinary Art and Design Practices with focus on border crossings, migration and survival, and Reimagining Social Infrastructure and Collective Futures, and Desert Futures. Scenarios for Decolonization at Carleton School of Architecture.
Her research and design work has been published in newspapers and journals including the New York Times, The Guardian, NRC, Haaretz, Volume, Surface, Frame, Metropolis, Harvard Design Magazine, and exhibited in venues including the Venice Architecture Biennale (2002, 2008, 2016, 2022), the UN Headquarter in NYC (2016), Harvard GSD (2017, 2020), NAiM/Bureau Europa (2012, 2021), Experimenta (2011), Het Nieuwe Instituut (2014), The Istanbul Design Biennale (2014), The Israel Digital Art Center (2012), and The Netherlands Architecture Institute (2007).
Alwine van Heemstra is a media producer. She is the owner of WinWin Stories. “It is my mission as a media producer to capture great stories and bring these to the right audience. I love ‘selling’ true stories that move and motivate people. I am a connector and a messenger. I have an urge to help people share their ideas and adventures with others. When I discovered media as a tool fifteen years ago, I decided to make it my profession.”
Cristina Ampatzidou is a Rotterdam-based researcher and writer with a background in Architecture and Urbanism and a founder of Amateur Cities. Currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Groningen on the topic of gaming and urban complexity, she previously worked as an embedded researcher for the Amsterdam Hackable Metropolis project, a collaboration of the University of Amsterdam, the Mobile City and One Architecture. Cristina has been a collaborator of Play the City! Foundation and the Architecture Film Festival of Rotterdam and has worked for several architecture offices in the Netherlands, including MAKS, Barcode Architects, OMA and the Powerhouse Company. Her research investigates the affordances of new media for ‘citymaking’ and the changing roles of professional designers, policy makers and citizens. She collaborated with artist Giuseppe Licari on the projects Mental Charlois and Swinging the Lamp and she curated the program of public events for Licari’s installation Public Room. Cristina has been a guest teacher for the Urban Body studio in TU Delft and is a regular contributor in Uncube and Bettery magazines. She is also a founding member of Beforelight, an artists’ collective working exclusively on lighting design and installations.
Willem Velthoven, trained in visual communications and art history, founded and developed Mediamatic as a cultural institution but also as a new media agency and technology developer. In the meantime, it has also been a publisher, a restaurant, an Arabic department store and a dating agency. Mediamatic is looking into the possibility of becoming a travel service. He is fascinated by the development of media culture and social software. Currently, he is most interested in developing open social networks as part of public institutions and infrastructure. The developments in this field yield enormous potential for the public sector.