Across her practice, Helene Kazan uses research and archival material to generate critical writing, multimedia installation, film and performance. Kazan is an AHRC/CHASE funded PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, for her doctoral project ‘The Object of Risk’.
‘The Object of Risk’ investigates risk as an active mechanism, which by its earliest conceptualisation as a colonial apparatus instigated an unequal distribution of the effects of risk through a colonial understanding of value in relation to human life and resource commodities. The project observes risk from the Lebanese context, in order to reveal how in the colonial era, risk’s unequal distribution came to embed a condition of precarity across Lebanon’s geopolitical setting. The research follows three key fields of risk analysis, first in relation to the threat of armed conflict; second, an observation of financial risk; and finally, an analysis of the risks associated with climate change. The study is focused through a series of architectural typologies of the home in Lebanon, the materiality of which reflects its own mode of transition as it is constructed in the present, through the imagination of a certain future. The work attempts to consider the limit conditions that produce each domestic space, alongside one another, to identify their complex collective nature, as an entangled network of power and force relations.
‘The Object of Risk’ investigates risk as an active mechanism, which by its earliest conceptualisation as a colonial apparatus instigated an unequal distribution of the effects of risk through a colonial understanding of value in relation to human life and resource commodities. The project observes risk from the Lebanese context, in order to reveal how in the colonial era, risk’s unequal distribution came to embed a condition of precarity across Lebanon’s geopolitical setting. The research follows three key fields of risk analysis, first in relation to the threat of armed conflict; second, an observation of financial risk; and finally, an analysis of the risks associated with climate change. The study is focused through a series of architectural typologies of the home in Lebanon, the materiality of which reflects its own mode of transition as it is constructed in the present, through the imagination of a certain future. The work attempts to consider the limit conditions that produce each domestic space, alongside one another, to identify their complex collective nature, as an entangled network of power and force relations.