I was deeply moved by Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzari’s lecture and their powerful reimagining of Gaza’s ruins as sites of memory and resistance. Their critique of colonial spatial practices, particularly the rejection of ‘emptiness’ narratives in favor of material and communal reclamation, is both urgent and inspiring. The way they center Palestinian agency, turning rubble into a political and architectural resource, challenges not just physical erasure but epistemic violence. I’m especially struck by their collaborative approach, working with Gazans to reconstruct rather than impose. I can’t wait to experience their installation at the biennale and see how these ideas translate spatially.
The lecture threw light on a very important aspect of architecture, which is the impact of architecture without building. The key interesting work presented by the presenter was their development of an abacus of materiality for the people of GAZA to choose from to rebuilt their narrative of their household as per their own interests and choices. These materials were built from the memory of the place, by including the ruins of the place, which included not just the architectural ruins, but the ruins of the people that died during the war. The idea that just removing the ruins was not limited to cleaning but was making the place devoid of its age-old cultural history. The idea was to read Palestine as not just planning proposal, but in section, understanding the surface, air and underground of what GAZA/ PALESTINE was. They proposed to adapt ruins as the skin of the new architecture. The key idea was to not redo what had happened in the white city where 4M of top layer sandstone was removed from the city which made the city away from its cultural identity and roots. In the end, the beauty of their idea is that just by developing the abacus of materiality, they propose to leave it to the people of GAZA to rebuild their lives with their own narratives using this atlas if they wish. Seeing this, I actually felt like sometimes ‘less is more’.
I was deeply moved by Yara Sharif and Nasser Golzari’s lecture and their powerful reimagining of Gaza’s ruins as sites of memory and resistance. Their critique of colonial spatial practices, particularly the rejection of ‘emptiness’ narratives in favor of material and communal reclamation, is both urgent and inspiring. The way they center Palestinian agency, turning rubble into a political and architectural resource, challenges not just physical erasure but epistemic violence. I’m especially struck by their collaborative approach, working with Gazans to reconstruct rather than impose. I can’t wait to experience their installation at the biennale and see how these ideas translate spatially.
The lecture threw light on a very important aspect of architecture, which is the impact of architecture without building. The key interesting work presented by the presenter was their development of an abacus of materiality for the people of GAZA to choose from to rebuilt their narrative of their household as per their own interests and choices. These materials were built from the memory of the place, by including the ruins of the place, which included not just the architectural ruins, but the ruins of the people that died during the war. The idea that just removing the ruins was not limited to cleaning but was making the place devoid of its age-old cultural history. The idea was to read Palestine as not just planning proposal, but in section, understanding the surface, air and underground of what GAZA/ PALESTINE was. They proposed to adapt ruins as the skin of the new architecture. The key idea was to not redo what had happened in the white city where 4M of top layer sandstone was removed from the city which made the city away from its cultural identity and roots. In the end, the beauty of their idea is that just by developing the abacus of materiality, they propose to leave it to the people of GAZA to rebuild their lives with their own narratives using this atlas if they wish. Seeing this, I actually felt like sometimes ‘less is more’.