Author: DAAR - Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency

The deadline for applications is May 3 13:00. To apply for the course use the online application form.

The course is intended for those with studies or experiences in architecture, art, urban research, postcolonial theory or activism who are interested in the ideological, social and political dimensions of Architecture. The course welcomes applicants with diverse cultural backgrounds committed to develop an artistic and architectural practice that is both theoretically and practically engaged in the struggle for justice and equality. The course is build on the work developed at DAAR and Campus in Camps.

 

Course Content

After the Second World War decolonization emerged as a powerful cultural and political process to liberate many countries from direct European colonial control and reshape power relations. It was a great moment of hope but also of great disillusion.

The course uses the term decolonization as a starting point to understand the globalized present and the associated contemporary conditions of exile, displacement and migration, revolts and struggles against oppression and domination with the aim to produce a convincing conceptual vocabulary and practice engaged in today’s struggles for justice and equality.

Architecture in the process of colonization and decolonization plays a crucial role in organizing spatial relations, expressing ideologies, and even when it is abandoned in ruin is mobilized as evidence for political and cultural claims. The analysis of the ways in which colonial architecture has been re-utilized is a new arena for understanding broader political and cultural issues around national identity and exile, sense of belonging or alienation, and social control or urban subversion. In this course architectural space is seen simultaneously as the product of the interaction of social and political transformations and as a privileged site for the analysis of these dynamics.

Drawing on the wealth of literature, recently discovered archive materials, and empirical research undertaken on the subject in the fields of geography, urban studies, politics, sociology and anthropology, the course’s methodological foundation remains anchored in the uniqueness of architectural analysis and spatial intervention.

The course is structured in two interrelated and parallel moments: 1) a period of research aimed at investigating the ways in which European colonial architecture has been re-used or destroyed in the process of decolonization and 2) activating collaboration with groups, associations, governmental and non governmental institutions for specific interventions in contemporary cities. Reference for the kind projects that the course aims to develop can be seen here www.decolonizing.ps

 

Course structure

The teaching philosophy of the course is based on the pedagogy developed by Campus in Camps, an experimental educational program established in Palestinian refugee camps www.campusincamps. In this approach, students are considered coauthors of meanings and bearers of knowledge. Therefore, the structure of the course is adapted to the urgencies and aspirations of the participants. At the same time the student-participants are asked to work under the direction of the course instructor who leads the group towards a collective project presented at the end of the year in an exhibition format and a publication. During the first semester lectures, research and site visits will help to build the case study for the Atlas of Decolonization and reading groups will help to structure a “collective dictionary”, a series of student-participant curated papers on key terms considered to be fundamental for the theoretical foundation of the architectural projects. The spring semester will emphasize the production and development of the project in the studio and its possible future realization. The course will revolve around three/four days every other week of intensive program of seminars, lectures, studios, mentorships, reading sessions, site visits, walks and convivial meals, spaced out by a week where participants independently develop work, research, write, read, draw, interview, and conduct site visits. The course is divided into two parts during one academic year: Decolonizing Architecture I, 30 credits (Autumn Semester); Decolonizing Architecture II, 30 credits (Spring Semester).

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With Suad Amiry, Thomas Keenan, Jorge Otero-Pailos, and Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal; moderated by Nikolaus Hirsch.

Suad Amiry is a Palestinian architect and writer, and the founder of RIWAQ: Center of Architectural Conservation in Ramallah, Palestine.

Thomas Keenan is Director of the Human Rights Project and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Literature, Human Rights Program at Bard College.

Jorge Otero-Pailos works at the intersection of art, architecture, and preservation. He is Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture in New York.

Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti are architects, artists, and educators whose work combines critical and rigorous theoretical research with an architectural, artistic, and pedagogical practice engaged in the struggle for justice and equality.

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February 28, 2017, 4:00-6:30PM

Displacement has been a structuring force impacting the work of creative practitioners around the globe throughout the modern period. As a prominent factor shaping forms of subjectivity, power relations of inclusion and exclusion, and institutions of state authority and industrial and creative production, displacement has served as a site of resistance for artists, architects, and other creative practitioners while simultaneously molding the frameworks and institutions through which they seek to engage the world.

This fifth seminar in the Displacement and the Making of the Modern World series seeks to bring together creative practitioners from multiple disciplines and mediums to engage with the question of how displacement has guided their work and how their creative practice serves as a sometimes physical impediment to the borders, state powers, political economic relationships, and other forces driving displacement. This seminar will begin by allowing the artists and architects assembled here to introduce their work and subjective relationships to displacement before moving into a discussion of how their work serves as both a locus of resistance and a site of institutional critique.

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February 24, 7pm, with Suad Amiry, Thomas Keenan, Jorge Otero-Pailos, and Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal; moderated by Nikolaus Hirsch
e-flux, 311 East Broadway, New York, NY 10002

http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/97566/n-a/

Refugee camps are established with the intention of being demolished. As a paradigmatic representation of political failure, they are meant to have no history and no future; they are meant to be forgotten. The history of refugee camps are constantly erased, dismissed by states, humanitarian organizations, international organizations and even self-imposed by refugee communities in fear that any acknowledgement of the present undermines a future right of return. The only history that is recognized within refugee communities is one of violence and humiliation. Yet the camp is also a place rich with stories narrated through its urban fabric. In tracing, documenting, revealing and representing refugee history beyond the narrative of suffering and displacement, Refugee Heritage is an attempt to imagine and practice refugee-ness beyond humanitarianism. ​

Contemporary notions of heritage and conservation are buttressed by institutions of great power, which are often oriented towards cultural expropriation. UNESCO’s “Format for the nomination of properties for inscription on the World Heritage List (Annex 5)” is a monumental building built during a colonial era. Over the course of two years, organizations and individuals, politicians and conservation experts, activists, governmental and non-governmental representatives and proximate residents gathered to discuss the implications of nominating Dheisheh Refugee Camp as a World Heritage Site. Refugee Heritage seeks to deploy the potential for heritage to be mobilized as an agent of political transformation.

On February 24 at e-flux, a panel event featuring Suad Amiry, Thomas Keenan, Jorge Otero-Pailos, and Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal (moderated by Nikolaus Hirsch) will seek to address the potential for practices and institutions of conservation to be understood as a force capable of mobilizing the political constitution of built space. The panel will streamed live here. Click here for more information.

The Concrete Tent, Dheisheh Refugee Camp, June 2015 (Photo Anna Sara)

In this particular moment of our practice based research trajectory and after having established DAAR and Campus in Camps, we would like to use the year of the fellowship as an opportunity to reflect on urgent political questions around refugeehood, exile and displacement.

Since our first work together, “Stateless Nation” for the Venice Biennale in 2003, a public installation made of enlarged travel documents and passports of Palestinian refugees situated between national pavilions in the Giardini, we have aimed to investigate and act upon the formation of different social, political and spatial relations between people, state and territory beyond the liberal notion of citizenship. These relations have been explored further for more than a decade, most recently through the project of the “Concrete Tent” in the garden of the Al Finiq Cultural Center in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, a pavilion that embodies the contradiction of the permanent temporariness of Palestinian refugees.

In this year long fellowship we hope to contribute to a better understanding of the limit and potentiality of socially engaged artistic practices in the greater struggle for justice and equality. The Human Rights Project will provide the fertile intellectual terrain for the re-conceptualization of refugee camps not only as humanitarian spaces but also as sites where the right to politics can be reclaimed. Furthermore, the Center for Curatorial Studies, its art community, library and archive will provide a critical cultural context around which to explore ways of making exhibitions as forms of research and political intervention.

Official announcement

DAAR and studioazue have been commissioned by the Italian Agency for Development and Cooperation a reconstruction Plan of Al Nada Neighborhood in Gaza. The overall objectives of the assignment are to assess the existing land, shelter, urban services and economic situation in the area, and to integrate the analysis into a comprehensive Detailed Development Plan for Al Nada ensuring enhancement of environment, governance and equitably serving the vulnerable. The process will develop synergies among public and private stakeholders towards the effective economic and social development of the area. Expected results are: the elaboration of a Detailed Development Plan of Al Nada adopting a participative and neighborhood-centered approach, the draft of guidelines for implementation (planning and building regulations), and the design of specific regeneration Projects
according to a Priority Action Plan.
The resident will be offered a studio and residency at DAAR in Beit Sahour (Bethlehem, Palestinian Territories) for a period of 3 months, from April to June 2016.
The resident will receive a salary according to work experience.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: March 30, 2016

Please submit:
1. CV
2. Examples of architectural projects
3. Cover letter (one page)
Sent to info@decolonizing.ps

OPEN CALL GAZA_03-compressed

DAAR_2016_.BC

 

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This year, events in the Middle East, Africa and Europe have led to popular movements that have been described as the largest refugee crisis since WWII.  This demands a response, and how this crisis is defined, mediated, and understood is central to the responses (global and local, personal and political, affective and activist) that can be generated.  This day-long workshop, along with an accompanying visual archive, will consider the question of “what is a refugee crisis?” focused on media combined with political theory.  Speakers include Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Heller, Forensic Architecture; Mia Cherlene White, University of California/Santa Barbara; Thomas Keenan, Bard College; Mezna Qato, Cambridge University; Paul Feigelfeld, Leuphana University; Itamar Mann, Georgetown University; Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, DAAR; Ayten Gundogdu, Barnard College.

March 11

Symposium
10:00am – 6:00pm
Pembroke Hall 305
172 Meeting Street,

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DAAR long-term project Common Assembly presented for the first time in 2011 in Neuchâtel (I) and later in 2012 in Nottingham (II) and New York (III), this September will take a form of an art installation in Taiwan (IV) to think through spaces for political participation, decision and action for exiled communities.

The centrepiece of DAAR exhibition is a life-sized section through the abandoned Palestinian Parliament in a suburb of Jerusalem – a parliament that has never been used. Construction started during the 1996 Oslo Accord when peace seemed possible and was halted in 2003 after the Second Intifada, (the Palestinian uprising) marked the failure of the political process.

The project began with the discovery that – mistakenly or intentionally – the building was constructed on Israel’s unilaterally declared border within Jerusalem. The parliament is partly within Israeli territory and partly within Palestinian controlled land – a small strip, no wider than the border line, is in legal limbo.

DAAR has built the section of the abandoned Palestine Parliament that the border line crosses in three dimensions. This suspended and elongated structure act as a forum for debate on political participation and how to be organised for exiled and geographically dispersed people.

National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (September 19–December 6, 2015)

Artist Making Movement – 2015 Asian Art Biennial