This Land’s Unknown
Collective exhibition
Curator: Nora Akawi

Part of 2019-1969: Radical Imaginaries for Architecture in the Arab Mashriq and Maghreb

The project is a search for representations of Arab spatial and architectural imaginaries born out of the desire to unhinge oppressive structures of their time. Breaking with history as we know it, they are a nod to politicized futurisms, as designs of fictions for self-liberation from identities assigned by the perpetual patriarchal colonial gaze. Bringing fantasies of decoloniality, acracy, and ecofeminism, they present a fragment of the layered Arab spatial fictions created today for the shattering of any one defining, repressive identity construct. Al majhoola min al-ard is understood primarily as the ‘uncharted land’, but also, it is ‘she who has been vanished from the Earth’. Al-majhoola (fem.), in addition to being the erased, forgotten, discarded, or drowned, she is also the unknown, unidentifiable, ungraspable, or untraceable; a specter simultaneously of the past, and of the future. With pasts robbed, and futures made unimaginable, the project gathers architects and artists whose work represents the unhinging of the structures through which this violence is exercised, and that together draw a reconsidered record of these pasts, and experiment with a multiform imagination of the future.

Nora Akawi

BRIGHT INFERNO

Bright Inferno imagines a network of subterranean tunnels connecting the Middle East beyond actual political boundaries. In the intricate geography of the region, space and mobility have become major constraints for exchanges and communication. At the intersection of oppressive political regimes and imminent climate change threats, exile, immigration and asylum have become urgent issues of the modern world. Bright Inferno seeks to suggest a buried world hidden from the State to enlighten common understandings, solidarity and potential political possibilities.

Nevertheless, in today’s world, dominated by surveillance and social media, the understanding of the underground edges it closer to a space of conspiratorial activity working against the public good. Yet, being underground was not always perceived as repulsive. During the Second World War theunderground was intricately associated with liberating spaces of political resistance. The idea of underground has evolved throughout history and its position in the public imagination has globally shifted from a space of subversion and political resistance to a repellent object of scarcely imaginable oppressive space. Bright Inferno acts in a regional and global context where the subterranean is considered as an obscure, gloomy and ambiguous space that acts negatively on its environment. Yet, Bright Inferno relates to times where the underground culture animated the anti-fascist movements. It acts in reaction to the oppressive political and social structures to enhance a genuine resistance by subversions of the current system. While by necessity Bright Inferno moves the protesting and disobedience movements to a private sphere, it relies on their ability to resurface as liberating systems. In the harsh Middle-Eastern political and social context where subterranean tenebrous routes are resurfacing, Bright Inferno imagines a network of dark yet hopeful underground flux.