Posted: 16.07.2010
In 2007, after a few years of engaging in spatial research and theory, taking the conflict over Palestine as our main case study, we have decided to shift the mode of our engagement and establish an architectural institute based around a studio/residency program in Beit Sahour, Bethlehem. Decolonizing Architecture Institute (DAi) seeks to use spatial practice as a form of political intervention and narration. The work of the residency is based around a network of local affiliations and the historical archives we have gathered in our previous work. Our practice has to continuously engage with a complex set of architectural problems centered around one of the most difficult dilemmas of political practice: how to act both propositionally and critically within an environment in which the political force field, as complex as it may be, is so dramatically skewed. Is intervention at all possible? How could spatial practice within the “here and now” of the conflict negotiate the existence of institutions, legal and spatial realities without becoming complicit with the unequal reality they produce? How to find an “autonomy of practice” that is both critical and transformative?