We are pleased to welcome you to the symposium titled Return and Reconstructions as Anticolonial Struggle, as part of Architecture of Repair in Palestine – a collective and ongoing practice, a nomadic forum that, since January 2023, has brought together architects, conservators, artists, community members, activists, and scholars.
Gathering around tables and in circles, sometimes online and at other times through publications and podcasts, we come together to think, to imagine, and to articulate visions of repair as acts of resistance and renewal—for the reconstruction of Gaza and liberation of Palestine, by Palestinians for Palestinians.
Against the genocidal scheme of ‘reconstruction’ sponsored by the American and Israeli regimes, which envision a new economic “peace” predicated on the complete erasure and debilitation of Palestinian communities across the scattered geographies of Palestine, a myriad of informal, unnoticed, community-rooted, and collectively led acts of repair are already underway by Palestinians dwelling in ruins and under occupation and siege.
With them, we witness how reconstruction(s) can be understood beyond a linear, restorative, and monumental act but a transformative, gradual, and possibly exhausting process of crumbling life-worlds; a painful process soaked in grief and deeply embedded in the rhythms of a daily life where healing seems to be so distant.
Under these conditions, what does it mean to repair and protect heritage? What objects and traces will be present in the archive of the future? How can damaged spaces foster living archives? And how might repair serve as resistance and testimony in the wake of genocide?
We come together to listen to the thoughts and practices of our guests to help us attune to a language capable of addressing these difficult questions:
- Sophia Azeb, Assistant Professor at University of California
- Toufoul Abou-Hodeib, Professor of History at University of Oslo
- Jamila J. Ghaddar Assistant Professor at University of Amsterdam
The event is moderated by Architecture of Repair in Palestine (Husam Abusalem, PhD Researcher at the University of South-Eastern; Emilio Distretti, Research Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London; and Margarida Waco, Doctoral Fellow, at ETH Zurich) and hosted by Oddgeir Osland, Dean at OsloMet.
