Son[i]a #335: Samaneh Moafi

Samaneh Moafi is an architect and the senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She oversees the Centre For Contemporary Nature, a division within Forensic Architecture which explores the relationship between human rights violations, environmental violence, and anthropogenic climate change. The Centre’s activist research into environmental damage challenges the historical perception of nature as a static, eternal backdrop against which human activity unfolds and calls for a new understanding of nature — contemporary nature —  which is now entangled with human agency in a feedback loop with consequences far beyond our control.

In this podcast, Samaneh Moafi turns a gaze to notions of ecocide, negative commons and environmental violence in pursuit of accountability and change. In doing so, she takes us through the Negev desert, extraterritorial toxic clouds, orangutan nests in Indonesia, forest fires and weaponised wind gusts in the Gaza strip.

Photo Courtesy of the organisation