Tracing Political Violence in Postcolonial Architecture
The Body Keeps the Score
#1 of the Organizing ArchitecturesLecture Series on “Coloniality”

26.11.2025, 19 Uhr – 20:30 Uhr
DAM Auditorium
The lecture will be held in English.
Free admission, no advance registration required.

A Lecture by Prof. Anoma Pieris (Melbourne School of Design)

In 2022, the citizens of Colombo (Sri Lanka) took to the streets in a peoples‘ sovereignty movement that challenged the government’s vision of neo-liberal progress. The materiality and messaging of their protracted urban occupation read the multilayered accretion of political violence as characterizing the postcolonial city. This lecture discusses how these layers accumulate, and how we might recognize them and parse them apart.

Anoma Pieris is Professor of Architecture and Associate Dean Research at the Melbourne School of Design. Her recent books include the multi-authored “Immigrant Industry: Building Postwar Australia” (Berghahn 2024); with Lynne Horiuchi, “The Architecture of Confinement: Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War” (Cambridge University Press 2022); and the anthology: “Architecture on the Borderline: Boundary Politics and Built Space” (Architext 2019). In 2022, she was guest curator for the Museum of Modern Art, New York exhibition “The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia 1947-1985”. Anoma’s recent work is on war cemeteries across the Indo-Pacific region.

This event is part of this year’s lecture series of the DFG Research Training Group “Organizing Architectures”. https://organizingarchitectures.org/