Sharjah Architecture Triennal Website More than a thousand years old, the Atacama lines and geoglyphs embody pre-Hispanic representations of the relationship with the underground and its resources. As such, they carry strong consequences for genealogy and ownership. Alonso Barros, Gonzalo Pimentel, and Juan Gili from the Fundación Desierto de Atacama, with Mauricio Hidalgo from the Quechua people of Huatacondo (Tarapacá, Chile), use this history to support indigenous struggles against mining companies and the Chilean State – so as to preserve the Quechua land and its history.
The student collective CCCP/2020 is researching the format of the syllabus as a pedagogical tool and as a site of knowledge production. In coordination with Triennial visitors, they will look at the geographies and histories that are encoded in course syllabi across different spatial and temporal thresholds.
Europeans saw the desert as a failed forest. Yet for centuries, Bedouin societies thrived through their extensive knowledge of plants that flourish in arid environments. Artist duo Cooking Sections (Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual) reimagine the role of desert plants, challenging the idea of the desert as a bare landscape. Working with engineering practice AKT II, they are prototyping a new model of non-irrigated urban gardens for Sharjah and other cities in arid environments.
Architect Dima Srouji, sound artist Dirar Kalash, archaeologist and anthropologist Silvia Truini, and anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj look at the displacement of archaeological fragments and the constant alteration of their context in Sebastia, Palestine. Asking how to resist the future manipulation of the ground, the team proposes a sonic construction of the constantly shifting terrain.
In its various manifestations throughout history, the architectural element of the platform has been a mediation between social formations and the ground – whether as house plinth, temple basement, or theatre stage. Architecture office DOGMA investigates historical examples of platforms – such as the Aboriginal Bora rings, Ancient Greek threshing floors, the stairs of the Apadana in Persepolis, and Adolphe Appia’s eurhythmic spaces – to understand the meaning of a quintessential and yet overlooked architectural element. A new commission by DOGMA in the centre of Sharjah will engage with the thriving public space of the city.
Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Felicity Scott and Mark Wasiuta unearth the archives of the audio-visual programme that was part of Habitat, the UN Conference on Human Settlements held in Vancouver in 1976. Looking at the visual culture and knowledge structures that Habitat aspired to produce, they examine the mechanisms of international aid and the construction of an imaginary of the Global South.
Feral Atlas brings together more than seventy scientists, humanists, artists, and designers to offer field observations on the more-than-human Anthropocene. Developed in association with AURA (Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene) and James Cook University, the project is organised by visual anthropologists Victoria Baskin Coffey and Jennifer Deger, together with artist and architect Feifei Zhou, and anthropologist Anna Tsing.
Architect Francesco Sebregondi and queer theorist Jasbir K. Puar research practices of maiming and containment in Palestine, particularly in the context of the brutal repression of the Great Return March protests in Gaza. Their joint project exposes the condition of the Israel/Gaza border as a site where new techniques of biopolitical, infrastructural, and urban control are currently being trialled.
In a performative lecture, architect and theorist Godofredo Pereira considers the history of exhumations in the context of environmental activism and of the truth and reconciliation commissions in Latin America. His work shows the relevance of the concept of exhumation in the face of increasing demands for global climate justice. Furthermore, Pereira is producing Last Evenings On Earth, in collaboration with the Sharjah Indian Association Community Centre and Sharjah's Labor Standards Authority, a project that entails the constitution of local teams to curate a film program for their neighborhoods. The project, whose title is taken from Roberto Bolaño's story Últimos atardeceres en la tierra, points at how futures are perceived or imagined.
Inspired by Frantz Fanon’s Pan-Africanism and revolutionary new humanism, Black Studies scholar Greg Thomas leads a project with artist and filmmaker Fatou Kande Senghor, painter Ivan Lopez, Diaz and the musical project El Houma, multimedia artist Merine, photographers Djibril Drame and Nadjib Bouznad, street calligrapher LMNT, scholar Luc Chauvin, and sound artist Kamel Badarneh on the relation between “body politics” and “the body politic.” The group will consider social relations between species and the environment as elemental concerns for anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial practices.
Architects Hamed Khosravi and Roozbeh Elias-Azar with artist Nazgol Ansarinia reflect on spatial imaginaries of domestic spaces in the city of Tehran. They reinterpret the codes and protocols of a typical apartment block through the fragmentation of its constituent parts and its reassembly – a process that looks to enable a continuous revolution that begins at home.
Named after the French diplomat responsible for the Suez Canal, the Lessepsian migration connected the marine ecology of the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, changing both forever. In a three-act performance coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the Canal's opening, the HaRaKa Platform/Adham Hafez Company (Adham Hafez, Mohsen Binali, Mona Gamil, Lamia Gouda, Adam Kucharski, and Donia Massoud) explores the legacies of its construction by looking at the intergenerational migration of animal species and dance gestures.
The thousands of sacred church forests in the Amahara state in Ethiopia are enclaves of religious practices and ecological intensity, in the context of the rising pressure from intensive farming and deforestation. Artist and architect Ibiye Camp with anthropologist Tom Boylston explore these unique places as a system of resistance.
The Informal Collective is a heterogeneous and fluid constellation of researchers and practitioners interested in the relationship between image and conflict in processes of decolonization. Established in 1998, the collective has been looking at photographs and video footage of occupied territories and their role within ongoing conflicts. The collective explores why some of the world’s unresolved conflicts remain invisible.
Researching global satellite images collected over the last 35 years, geographer Jamon Van Den Hoek and artist Steve Salembier (Atelier Bildraum) develop an immersive installation that visualizes the subjectivity and partiality of Earth-observing satellite data, and questions the spatial and temporal disparities of scientific knowledge.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan presents a new body of work on the politics and possibilities of reincarnation. Through listening closely to "xenoglossy" (the impossible speech of reincarnated subjects), this performance explores a collectivity of lives who use reincarnation to negotiate their condition at the threshold of the law—people for whom injustices and violence have escaped the historical record due to colonial subjugation, corruption, rural lawlessness, and legal amnesty. In the piece, reincarnation is not a question of belief but a medium for justice.
The Ganges Delta is a place dominated by fluidity and movement of land and water. At the confluence of the Padma, Jamuna, and Meghna rivers, the line between water and land is indistinguishable due to tidal dominance. Water inflates during the monsoon, expanding territory, swallowing the banks and everything on it. This condition has produced a peculiar case of intergenerational inhabitation and land title, where the collective memories of older generations inform descendants about their possessions submerged in the water. Marina Tabassum and associates chart the paradoxical relationships of dry and wet culture, oral history and land title which define the unique condition of this unsettled landscape.
Visual artist Marwa Arsanios is continuing her work on the relation between feminism, land rights, and ecological activism. She is working with ecofeminist political groups that practice communal farming, such as the Kurdish autonomous women’s movement in Northern Syria, Grupo Semillas in Tolima, Colombia, and DESMI in Chiapas, Mexico. Focusing on the localised knowledge of the land, Arsanios calls into question longstanding associations of womanhood and nature in terms of fertility and nation building.
Architect Mohamed Elshahed and historian Farida Makar explore the founding of the contemporary Egyptian state, focusing on the government's project to design and build thousands of new schools based on a range of standard prototypes. Through the lens of pedagogy, Elshahed and Makar examine nation making and its impact on notions of futurity in post-independence politics.
Wooden sailing vessels, or dhows, have crossed the Indian Ocean for centuries, creating a geography of trade that connects India, Iran, the Gulf coast and East Africa. The dhows predate European imperialism, and continue to thrive by operating in the gaps of global shipping routes. Anthropologist Nidhi Mahajan charts these networks, examining relations of kinship, domesticity, patronage and debt that are formed through and on the dhows.
Artist and Architect Ola Hassanain with actor Jasour Abu-Elgasim, researcher and activist Gada Kadoda, architect Osman Elkhier, film maker Ahmed Mahmoud, and economist Mayada Abelazim develop a project that links architectural knowledge production and the concept of the "Black outdoors." Using architectural elements in collaboration with Mohamed Dardiri, they utilise the spatial vocabulary developed in the recent revolution in Khartoum, to consider how revolutionary ruptures make it possible to aspire to new kinds of ecologies.
Public Works looks at the architecture of the so-called maid's room, which is common in Lebanese homes. Through this particular interior, they confront the structural marginalisation of migrant domestic workers through the Kafala system. Relying on historical accounts, archival documentation, legal research, and interviews, their project targets the audience's individual responsibilities – whether as sponsors of domestic workers, architects, law-makers, or as beneficiaries of a normalized system.
Mehr is a Farsi word that translates to compassion. It is also the name of the largest public housing scheme of the Islamic Republic, constituting 2.3 million nuclear-family dwelling units spread across the territory of Iran. Using the Mehr as a base, architect Samaneh Moafi develops a project in collaboration with Platform 28, WORKNOT! collective, Mhamad Safa, Maria Bessarabova and the residents of Mehr in Dowltabad, Esfahan. The project sets out to challenge the structures of state patronage and male patriarchy in working-class homes. Organising a workshop and deploying performative methods, the work reclaims domesticity as a space for collective rituals and alternative forms of dwelling.
Networks of citizen journalists, media activists, and stringers have been the primary source of image production in the Syrian revolution since 2011. In a lecture-performance, anthropologist Stefan Tarnowski will enact the founding of a media office, from its incorporation to the forces that are at work behind image production in a time of war.
Studio Anne Holtrop (Anne Holtrop, Yuiko Shigeta, Stephan Lando, Marina Montresor, Iris Hilton, Cristiana Lopes and Philipp Wuendrich) explores the uses and properties of gypsum through its material gestures. Combining the Studio's own work with that of Holtrop's students from ETH Zurich (Julius Henkel, Senta Fahrländer, Jonas Kissling) and Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio (Massimiliano Marconi, Angelique Kuenzle, Laura Merlin), the project considers the material’s geology, mining, craftsmanship, techniques, and cultural significance.
The sonic reach of the call to prayer (Athan), broadcast from the holy mosque of Makkah, amplifies the palpable parameters of the city’s boundaries and pronounces its sacredness. Bringing together years of work, Studio Bound considers the various lines that intersect and define the city, in a moment when it is undergoing major transformations that are putting tension on Makkah’s urban fabric.
The Otolith Group, formed by the artists and theorists Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar, think with Blackness and Denise Ferreira da Silva's "equation of value" for a new commission that continues their exploration of the conditions of post-human life. Working with the poetics of vocality, choreography, and animation, the project looks at the entanglements of climate and racism in the creation of The Commonwealth, the 1948 British Nationality Act, and the unstable and ambient fear that constitutes citizenship in the UK today.
In a new film commission based on the story of the Ngurrara Canvas II, artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen will explore the indigenous histories of the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia, looking at the use of memory, painting, and testimony to reclaim ancestral land in a postcolonial context.
Ngurrara Canvas II is a 10 x 8 metre painting that was produced in 1997 by a group of forty artist-claimants in support of their native title claim over vast stretches of the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia. It is the largest and one of only several examples where painting has been used as proof of Aboriginal land tenure and native title. NCII embodies intergenerational Aboriginal relationships to country, through its depiction of the unifying feature of jila, the permanent waterholes that underpin law and ceremony for Ngurrara people. It will be presented in Sharjah alongside newly commissioned work on the legal history of the native title hearing.
Artists: Manmarriya Daisy Andrews, Munangu Huey Bent, Ngarta Jinny Bent, Waninya Biddy Bonney, Nyuju Stumpy Brown, Pajiman Warford Budgieman, Jukuna Mona Chuguna, Raraj David Chuguna, Tapiri Peter Clancy, Jijijar Molly Dededar, Purlta Maryanne Downs, Kurtiji Peter Goodijie, Kuji Rosie Goodjie, Yirrpura Jinny James, Nyangarni Penny K-Lyon, Luurn Willy Kew, Kapi Lucy Kubby, Monday Kunga Kunga, Milyinti Dorothy May, Ngarralja Tommy May, Murungkurr Terry Murray, Mawukura Jimmy Nerrimah, Ngurnta Amy Nuggett, Japarti Joseph Nuggett, Nanjarn Charlie Nunjun, Yukarla Hitler Pamba, Parlun Harry Bullen, Kurnti Jimmy Pike, Killer Pindan, Miltja Thursday Pindan, Pulikarti Honey Bulagardie, Nada Rawlins, Ngumumpa Walter Rose, Kulyukulyu Trixie Shaw, Pijaji Peter Skipper, Jukuja Dolly Snell, Ngirlpirr Spider Snell, Mayapu Elsie Thomas, George Tuckerbox, and Wajinya Paji Honeychild Yankarr.
A trans-disciplinary team from Indonesia, Singapore, and Switzerland has come together to investigate the story of the subak – the complex irrigation system of Bali that has, thanks to the close cooperation of farmers and priests, held the island in a balance for a thousand years. Composers Vivian Wang and Dewa Alit, artist collective U5, and architects Li Tavor, Alessandro Bosshard, and Matthew van der Ploeg, working with Adam Jasper at ETH Zürich, explore the homologies of landscape, time, and music. The project recounts how the hydraulic and cultural landscape of the subak became one of the first sites of resistance to the so-called Green Revolution.