Proposals for Decolonizing Architecture

This lecture imagines scenarios to reverse the deadlock and trauma of colonized and occupied spaces.

Sandi Hilal is an architect based in Bethlehem. She is consultant with the UNRWA on the camp improvement program and visiting professor at Al-Quds/Bard University in Abu Dis-Jerusalem. She is a founder member of The Decolonizing Architecture Institute (DAAR), established in 2007 with Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman. DAAR is an art and architecture collective and a residency program based in Beit Sahour, Palestine that combines discourse, spatial intervention, education, collective learning, public meetings and legal challenges. DAAR projects have been shown in forums including the Venice Biennale, the Bozar in Brussels, NGBK in Berlin, the Istanbul Biennial, The Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Home Works in Beirut, Architekturforum Tirol in Innsbruk, the Tate in London, the Oslo Triennial, and the Centre Pompidou. In 2006 Hilal obtained the title of research doctorate in Transborder policies for daily life in the University of Trieste. Her writing and projects have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, Il Manifesto, Al Ayyam, Al- Quds, Art Forum, and Archis, among other places.

Alessandro Petti is an architect, urbanist, and researcher based in Bethlehem. Petti is the director of The Decolonizing Architecture Institute (DAAR) which he cofounded, in 2007, with Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman, and which explores the problems and potentiality associated with re-use, reinhabitation and subversion of colonial structures. Petti teaches at Honors College Al-Quds/Bard University in Abu Dis-Jerusalem and in 2006, obtained the title of Research Doctorate in Urbanism at the IUAV University of Venice under the supervision of Giorgio Agamben. He writes and lectures extensively on emerging spatial order dictated by paradigms of security and control, and has curated different research projects on the contemporary urban condition.