Architectures of Violence is a site-responsive reflection on the afterlives of violence inscribed in architecture, place, and institutional memory. Staged in a former meat hall and town hall turned museum in Middelburg, the reading traces entangled legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and modernity. Moving from early modern European meat markets to the transatlantic slave trade, Nazi bunkers, and the genocide in Gaza, it explores how systems of ranking control - over animal and human bodies - are architecturally embedded in Western museums and masked by cultural polish. Beneath the limewashed walls lie palimpsests of trauma: white cubes built atop bones.

Drawing on critical theory, decolonial thought, and architectural history, the reading asks: What truths survive beneath aesthetic neutrality? How do we confront spaces that sanitize brutality for display? How do we expose the bones and mechanisms of domination hidden beneath the scrubbed floors of biennials and white cube galleries? How can we stop these sites of memory from being idyllically reframed as poetic ruins, their romantic veneer erasing the violence and suffering embedded in every cracked wall? To resist nostalgia and the monumentalist spectacle of violence, we must foreground ongoing struggles for justice and liberation. To curate here is to excavate - to speak, to listen, and to refuse forgetting. How do we engage with these spaces not as muted relics or whitewashed concessions, but as eloquent witnesses - archives of forensic testimony that speak, if we learn to listen?