The Schelling Architecture Foundation has refused to award the winner of its top prize because they signed a letter pledging to boycott Israeli institutions. Artist and writer James Bridle was unanimously awarded the biennial Architectural Theory Prize by the Schelling Architecture Foundation in June this year for their “outstanding contributions to architectural theory”. The foundation awards four winners a €10,000 prize every other year for their “outstanding contributions to architectural theory”.
But on Sunday, ahead of the awards ceremony scheduled for 20 November, Bridle was informed the foundation’s committee would not award them with the prize because they had co-signed a call for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. The Literary Hub – signed by around including Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, and Viet Thanh Nguyen – states that signees “cannot in good conscience engage with Israeli institutions without interrogating their relationship to apartheid and displacement,” in response to “Israeli cultural institutions, often working directly with the state, have been crucial in obfuscating, disguising and artwashing the dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians for decades.” In response, the Schelling Foundation, wrote that it “faces a profound and delicate problem, a problem arising from our awareness of Germany’s history and of the responsibilities resulting from that history.
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