Architectural Flows of Settler Colonialism and Resistance

In an image taken at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by Matthew Ludak, an MFA alumni and photojournalist, a single protester wearing a Palestinian Keffiyeh around their head is relaxing on the lawn facing the Palestine solidarity encampment. Behind the tents, Memorial Library—a major building and research repository—looms large.

There is a calmness to this image taken in the early hours of April 30, 2024 that betrays the violence that followed shortly after. What makes the image so startling perhaps, is that police raided the encampment the very next morning. State and city police descended began to forcibly removing tents.

Later on May 1, several officers pinned Dr. Samer Alatout to the ground during the police raid on UW-Madison’s encampment. An officer pressed their leg on Alatout’s shoulder blade while Alatout laid flat on his stomach. This technique of restraint—known as “Three Point Prone” used to neutralize a resisting body—overtook global imaginary when, in 2020, Officer Derick Chauvin used it on George Floyd in Minneapolis. Except Chauvin did not place his leg on Floyd’s arm—he placed it on his neck. Minutes later, Floyd was killed.

The distance between restraint and death is mere inches. The post-mortem diagnosis of Floyd’s deceased body fails to mention the histories that propelled that deadly encounter, pinning it to biological failures produced by pressure. It is no coincidence that Palestinian flags were visible at Black Lives Matter protests that followed.

In his own writing, Alatout asserts that the “bio-territorial” calls into question the separation of questions of land sovereignty and population within discourses of occupation. The university is an example of the failure of such a distinction, implementing its power through both land claims and through its surveillance and management of bodies. The impermanence of the UW-Madison encampment—or rather, the mobile nature of its structures—disturbs the image of the university as a site of settler power and perpetuity and reveals how it is an apparatus of occupation facilitating both land siege and political management of knowledge and bodies. 

Territorial Rearrangements

The acceleration of humanitarian and ecological violence currently unfolding emerges through a longer process of settler colonialism that begins with the installation of defensive settler infrastructures. One of the most pressing parallels between the U.S. and Israel is their shared strategies of settler colonialism: deploying architecture, agriculture, and colonial property regimes to permanently transform the land.

The accumulation of stolen land and imposition of settler property regimes legitimizes and perpetuates the material possibilities of settler status. As noted by Eyal Wiezman, Zionist settlements in occupied Palestine rely on “territorial rearrangement” to surveil, obstruct, and eventually siege Palestinian land and property. This process, which is also central to the settler occupation of Turtle Island, relies on large-scale clearing and demolition processes to reshape the existing ecosystems and topographies of the land.

Settler states engage in territorial rearrangement to prime the land for new settlers and their aspirations of permanence. Settler regimes expropriate the land and transform its ecology by implanting infrastructure. While certain infrastructural constructions such as settlements, ports, and plantations are visible in the land, others are hidden in plain sight. Through networks of pipelines, electrical systems, agriculture, and military architecture, occupation embeds itself temporally and spatially.

Negative environmental repercussions of these infrastructures are not limited to their construction and maintenance. When they fail, they can pose serious safety and health risks for residents—as we have seen over and over with oil pipelines disproportionately placed in Indigenous communities.

Settlers also siege existing infrastructure of Indigenous groups. In coastal Gaza, access to clean water has been made scarce—posing devastating consequences to its inhabitants, including threats of disease, dehydration, and death. This is compounded by the active bombings of aqueducts and pipelines, resulting in lethal contamination and it’s enduring effects.

Under both U.S. and Israeli occupations, assertions to the land are accompanied by an erasure of its existing inhabitants. Settlers simultaneously employ the contradictory claims and visuals of “desolation” and “territorial fertility” to simultaneously justify their presence and erase Indigenous communities. Much like the large mapping projects by the Israeli government led to the expropriation of land in the West Bank, the early settlement projects of the Euro-colonial and then U.S. occupation relied on cartographic expeditions.

These mapping projects laid the groundwork for land siege and construction of settler infrastructures. Native nations are then coerced into negotiating and deferring to “colonial property regimes” to access their lands. Similarly, Palestinians have been subject to Israel’s property regimes while being afforded no protection under its legal system.

Settler infrastructures on occupied land are both displays of power and inherently “defensive apparatuses,” marking settler presence while anticipating attack and dissent through their very forms. Apart from visible panoptic architecture and fortifications such as fences, border walls, and gates, a “defensive city” is embedded with concealed architectural barriers and machines. Pedestrian walkways are built to fold under the weight of vehicles while highway systems are produced to optimize military access into urban space.

Other concealed barriers regulate and restrict bodies themselves, such as anti-houseless or “hostile” architecture, CCTV surveillance cameras, natural barriers such as hedges or plants, or man-made materials such as barbed wire and glass shards. Through such strategies, settler cities tightly manage the movement and behaviors of their inhabitants. As such, the settlement and its infrastructure exists not just to contain or exclude, but as an extension of the industrious eye which seeks to lay claim through revealing and mapping.

Ivory Watch Tower

Academic institutions are at the very heart of settler regimes. Universities are themselves agents of occupation—of this land and of Palestine. Many of the same institutions that sicced police on their own students and faculty, including UW-Madison, are the beneficiaries of settler colonial property regimes such as the 1862 Morrill Act, which violently expropriated over ten million acres of Indigenous land to establish land-grant universities. Universities are also now heavily vested in entities such as Black Rock Capital, which fund weapons and defense manufactures like Lockheed Martin—whose weapons maintain occupations in places such as Palestine. 

Apart from asserting itself through spatial configurations, the university functions to further legitimize settler status through the perpetuation of settler pedagogy, research models, and exchange programs that reaffirm settler sovereignty while simultaneously appropriating and institutionalizing Indigenous knowledge. Such programs not only fund research that shapes settler regimes but also facilitate the development of social, academic, and economic networks between occupations.

The university does exercise hard power, however, in response to dissent that threatens the U.S. imperial and settler project. Unlike their global counterparts, many American universities have their own police departments separate from the police departments of the city and state. Largely created in response to the revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 70s, these police departments were created to respond to the specific needs and nature of the university. These private departments patrol and surveil already fortified and sprawling campuses.

But on the morning of May 1, the police who tore down the encampment at Library Mall were not campus police—they were city and state police. The tactics they deployed against Alatout, gender and women’s studies professor Dr. Sami Schalk, and students were not designed for campuses nor by University police, but for crowd control by the state. Thus, while the University retains a private armed force, it also deploys the government’s armed factions.

The protection of University property and infrastructure by multi-level police forces demonstrates how the university is a bio-territorial instrument of occupation.

One thing these encampments prove is that inasmuch as massive industrial-scale architecture is a central method and symbol of settler colonialism, it is the tent and other makeshift habitation that emerges as the most potent architectural symbol of our time. This is perhaps most precisely articulated by Rebecca Belmore’s Biinjiya’iing Onji (From Inside) which was installed in 2014 in Athens. In this work, a marble tent is set in contention with the Parthenon, one of the most prominent Grecian temples. Belmore’s work articulates the conditions of “a state of perpetual emergency” experienced by the dispossessed as their lives are suspended within makeshift structures and militarized borders.

Beyond a signal of displacement and dispossession, we must also read the tent as a form of resistance. From the heart of the “Stop Cop City” Movement in Weelaunee Forest to the Palestinian solidarity and divestment encampments across the world, the tent emerges as a potent symbol of protest and resistance. 

The tent as an architectural practice also takes on multi-scalar forms under Indigenous architectural practices. Wigwam dwellings made by Native North American tribes such as the Ho-Chunk—on whose stolen land UW-Madison stands—were constructed to maximize mobility. Wigwams represent lives that were not contained by settler borders but moved across sovereign lands guided by seasonal patterns and Indigenous cosmologies.

Resistance Futures

We began this year forty-three months into a systematic campaign against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip. As we prepare to end it, nearly 45,000 Palestinians have been killed and countless others injured and displaced. It must not be forgotten that this campaign was a lead-up from nearly seventy-six years of Israeli occupation. However, we must also remember that this time equally commemorates seventy-six years of Palestinian resistance to this occupation.

If techniques of domination flow between occupations, so do strategies of resistance. Over the past year, universities have been at the center of student-led resistance to U.S. imperialism. At UW-Madison and across the country, students’ demands are clear: divestment from genocide and the occupation of Palestine. Protestors inextricably tie U.S. and Israeli settler colonialism, through transfers of death-dealing capital, infrastructure, and weapons that rapidly flow between the two states.

If we reorient the university as a multi-dimensional panoptic structure, how might we understand ourselves in the university at this very moment? How might the university be destabilized as a display of settler power and a site of surveillance and management in the face of colonial occupation? How might the gaze of power be defied and dismantled into new visions for the future?

One thing remains certain: the encampment never forgoes the possibility of a future. It anticipates one.

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Featured image: The University of Wisconsin-Madison Palestine Solidarity Encampment. Photo by Matthew Ludak, April 30th, 2024.

Anamika Singh (b. India) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose work undertakes the contested histories produced by transfers and flows of power and violence. Singh is currently a MFA fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and working on Sheetla, her forthcoming experimental documentary. Singh has taught at Rutgers University-Newark and has been a guest lecturer at the Architectural Association, London. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Website. Contact.