Decolonizing Architecture Art Research

Through this open call, we are inviting you to apply to become part of a core haṣīra group that will follow the entire haṣīra iteration. As a member, you will also be invited to bring friends, companions, and guests as hosts, welcoming them into the process and into the ḥaṣīra community. For us, this open call is not only about participation in individual sessions, but about beginning to build a core haṣīra community, one based on continuity, hospitality, and shared responsibility. Date: 5-16 March & 6 June; 2 hours For more information on how to apply to participate in the program, email: [email protected]

Palestinian architect, artist, and educator, Sandi Hilal, reflects on hospitality as a political practice, showing how private spaces – from living rooms to summer houses – can become sites of agency and collective self-determination. 📖 Read ‘Commoning Private Space: An Interview with Sandi Hilal’ by Reyhaneh Mirjahani on NO NIIN Issue 33: To Decide Your Becoming. 🔗 Link in bio @reyhanmirj @decolonizing.ps Image: Sandi Hilal. Photo: Negar Latifian

The second session of #DAASinSharjah convened regional practitioners for an open-format gathering centered on dialogue, reflection, & shared learning. Participants engaged closely with one another’s experiences, exploring the ways in which learning occurs in relation to & within community, rather than in isolation. The absence of presentations or structured outcomes allowed for a more organic flow of conversation, guided by a shared commitment to openness & care. This trust & willingness to embrace unpredictability created space for spontaneous, intimate, and urgent conversations to unfold. Out of these conversations, something rare emerged: a feeling that this form of collective learning, rooted in dialogue and grounded in lived practice, could continue to grow long after the gathering ended. As one participant noted: “Reading each other’s interviews was like a new form of listening—holding each other’s emotions with care. There was such patience. It was powerful. Being in this space together, returning to it after our first session, staying with each other’s words & thoughts, reading each other’s voices—it’s been such a beautiful experience. It grounded me in a way I’ve never felt before. It’s something important, & maybe that’s why I’d love to write about it—to emphasize it as a way of producing knowledge that doesn’t really have space in institutional contexts.” DAAS—DECOLONIZING ARCHITECTURE ART STUDIES—in Sharjah is an advanced research educational programme led by DAAR—Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti. The programme is radically structured around participant’s practices & interests, offering a critical space for reflection on questions emerging from practices rooted in context and serving as a space for convivial collective learning. DAAS in Sharjah is a joint initiative by @sharjaharchitecture , @sharjahart , & @africainstitute . Advisory members include Hoor Al Qasimi, Salah M. Hassan, Walter Mignolo, May Al-Dabbagh, Shahram Khosravi, Zoe Butt, and Charles Esche. Stay tuned as we share more from the concluding session, scheduled for October 2025. Images: @ahmed.oss1

DAAR will host the RIBA Charles Jencks Award Lecture, at 66 Portland Place, London on 30 May 2025, followed by a conversation with Thomas Aquilina, co-director of the New Architecture writers. — Link in bio

Decolonizing Architecture: Encampments The application period for this postmaster course opens on 4th of March 2025 and closes on the 8th of April In the past year, student encampments have re-emerged as powerful sites of protest against Israel's regime of colonization, occupation, and apartheid in Palestine, as well as the complicit silence of Western universities and governments that provide support for Israel’s war crimes and genocide in Gaza. Moreover, student encampments have been an extraordinary laboratory for commoning practices and student-led critical pedagogies. This course will provide a space to critically reflect on the historical events of the past year, examining their impact on higher education, academic freedom, and critical thinking. However, more than an archival study of encampments, we will strategically shift our focus and attention to the decades-long ongoing struggles in Palestinian refugee camps. Palestinian camps have been spaces of resistance against Israel’s negation of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba. Emerging at the end of the 1940s as humanitarian spaces, over the following decades they became sites of political urbanity in exile, where new social and political structures were created outside the state system. Despite their differences, refugee camps and student encampments are temporary spaces where the world is reassembled in new configurations. Although both emerge from moments of crisis and are often dominated by an expiration date, they reveal the power of people coming together in the struggle for justice and equality. The course welcomes participants eager to critically and collaboratively explore the spatial, social, and political dimensions of various forms of encampments. Follow the link in bio to read more on the application website All photos by @hermanhjorth 1 — DAAS Living Room for Palestine, December 2023 2 — DAAS Living Room for Palestine, November 2023 3-6 — Encampment Stockholm University, May 2024 7-9 — Encampment Riksdagen, June 2024 10 — DAAS Living Room for Solidarity (Encampment Norberg), July 2024

As a closing ceremony of the third annual gathering of the Entity of Decolonization at the former Borgo in Carlentini, participants burned the "facade" — the 2023 Venice Biennale Golden Lion awarded artwork by DAAR @decolonizing.ps — and collected the ashes the following morning. The scale model of the facade of the former "Ente Colonizzazione Latifundo Siciliano" was used as an effigy, burned to cleanse the site of its fascist ghosts, and the ashes were gathered to fertilize future projects of Entity of Decolonization Read "Architectural Profanations", the DAAR interview with Nick Axel @alucidwake on @e_flux , link in bio Image 1 — 5 by Faian Konopka @fabianknpk Image 5 — 10 by Rehaf Al Batniji @rehaf_batniji

The next Tree School gathering will take place in the last week of September in Cairo, Egypt. Please get in touch through our email if you would like to attend.