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China exits Venice Biennale over Alison Killing's Xinjiang detention camp investigation

2023-05-26T15:36:00-04:00

Opening week for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale wasn't short of excitement, reflection, criticism, and social commentary from the architecture community and the general public. With that said, another piece of controversial news was recently reported by the Italian news and analysis website Decode39 on the Chinese Embassy's decision to exit one of the largest international design and culture exhibitions.

According to Decode39, China withdrew from the event due to an installation titled Investigating Xinjiang’s Network of Detention Camps. Created by architect and urban designer Alison Killing of Killing Architects, the project aimed to explore and investigate the "network of detention camps built by the Chinese government in Xinjiang for the mass detention of Muslims."

Previously on Archinect: Architect Alison Killing has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her Chinese internment camp investigations

In 2021, Killing was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in the International Reporting cat...

Architect Alison Killing has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her Chinese internment camp investigations

2021-06-29T15:14:00-04:00

This year’s Pulitzer Prize committee has named an architect a winner in its International Reporting category, marking the first time someone in the field has won the prestigious journalism award in an area outside of criticism.

Alison Killing has been awarded the prestigious prize for an ongoing project using satellite imagery to track internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region. The sites are said to be harboring up to a million Muslim detainees made up of Uyghur and other minority groups that have been subject to brutal government repression for decades. Killing has been featured in Archinect before for a related project exploring a dialogue between death and architecture.

Related on Archinect: The architecture of death and dying

Killing was cited alongside BuzzFeed staffers Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek to orchestrate a hunt for physical evidence of the camps using a Google Earth-like Chinese search engine called Baidu. Using the search engine, Killing’s team was able to...

Killing Architects wins New Generations film competition on the future of architectural practice

2014-01-14T15:19:00-05:00

In the ongoing discussion of the future of the architectural profession, New Generations has announced the Rotterdam-based firm Killing Architects as the winner of their first competition. All architects and creatives under 40 were invited to submit short films that show innovative forms of architectural practice and their own interpretation of the shifting role of the architect -- in both a construction industry and societal context.

Check out Killing Architects' winning response