April 2010
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Extra-Territoriality in the Middle East - Open Anthology
Guest Editor: Ursula Biemann
For the longest time we have thought of extra-territoriality as a designated space or status that lies outside territorial boundaries and either benefits or suffers from the suspension of jurisdiction overruling the national territory. Embassies, refugee camps, free trade zones are a few cases in point. In recent years, the number and genres of extraterritorial spaces have increased, diversified and consolidated into a dense configuration of exception and exemption that superimpose and perhaps undermine the very notion of territory. What this edition of ArteEast Quarterly brings to light is the attempt at confining people in a bounded space always instigates a heightened desire to connect across distances and activate new forms of trans-local communication. A territory is no longer (just) a shape but also a complex system of relationships and large-scale structural networks. This issue presents innovative art, video, design and academic practices that analyze and intervene in these contested terrains and their regimes of representation. It is conceived as an open-ended anthology that can grow over time.
With contributions by Francesca Recchia, Anna Wachtmeister, Azad Shekhani, Ehsan Maleki, Ziad Turkey, Lee Wang, Oroub el-Abed, Rana El Nemr, Myriam Abdelaziz, Mona Fawaz, Marwan Ghandour, Sari Hanafi, Ismael Sheikh Hassan, Saba Innab, a-film, Ursula Biemann, Beshara Doumani, Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti, Eyal Weizman (Decolonizing Architecture), Ozayr Saloojee, Molly Eagen, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, and Rasha Salti.
Bio: Ursula Biemann studied art and cultural theory at the School of Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. As a video essayist, theorist and curator, she has produced a considerable body of work on migration, mobility, technology and gender. Recent art research projects include “Black Sea Files” on the Caspian oil geography (2005) at Kunstwerke Berlin and the Istanbul Biennial; and the video anthology “Sahara Chronicle” 2006-2009. Her award winning videos are internationally exhibited. She published numerous books "Geography and the Politics of Mobility"(2003) and a monograph "Mission Reports—Artistic Practice in the Field “(2008) Cornerhouse Publishers. Biemann holds a honorary degree from the Swedish University. She is a researcher at the Institute for Critical Theory at the University of Arts Zurich and teaches seminars and workshops internationally.
Email: ursula@geobodies.org
Website: http://www.geobodies.org
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A Post-Territorial Museum
Interview with Beshara Doumani
Beshara Doumani is one of the most celebrated social historians of Palestine, his interest lies in "recovering the history of social groups, places, and time periods that have been silenced or erased by conventional scholarship on the Modern Middle East. His specialty is the social and cultural history of peasants, merchants, artisans, and women who live in the provincial regions of the Arab East during the late Ottoman period (18th and 19th centuries).Beshara Doumani has been appointed director of the Palestinian Musuem and entrusted with developing and implementing a concept for this new cultural institution. In the interview, Ursula Biemann and Beshara Doumani discuss the challenges of conceiving and realizing a Palestinian Museum considering the absence of a sovereign state and the status of approximately five million Palestinians living as refugees under various state authorities.
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Return to Nature
by Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman
The Beit Sahour/London based architecture and planning collaboration of Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman mobilize architecture and planning as a tactical tool in the unfolding struggle of Palestine. In a series of innovative proposals, they open an arena for thinking different notions of ‘return’. Rather than employ a rhethoric of ‘conflict resolution’ entrapped in a top-down perspective, the collective engages the term ‘decolonization’, offering diverse and tangible possibilities for spatial transformation. Areas of Palestine that have or will be liberated from Israeli occupation provide a laboratory for the multiple ways in which they imagine the re-use, re-inhabitation or recycling of the architecture of Israel's occupation, beginning from the moment it is unbound from the military/political power that defined it. The following text and two books Activism and Migration chronicle the process of re-appropriating a former Israeli military fortress through design and cultural intervention and illustrates how creating unprecedented cases may lead to new possibilities for engaging in a debate over spaces of conflict.
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The Refugee-Industrial Complex: the QIZ in Jordan
An interview with Oroub el-Abed
In 2001, the U.S. established several Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ) in Jordan and Egypt, where labor-intensive products (such as textiles and garments), were manufactured for tax-free export to the U.S. under specific conditions. The industries drew many young women into the workforce who had never been involved in paid labor before. Researcher Oroub El-Abed conducted a field research in the north of Jordan where she interviewed women working in Al-Hassan Industrial Zone near Irbid and living in either rural villages or refugee camps in the area, about how their lives has changed in the process.
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Baghdad Offline
Photographs and text by Ziad Turkey
I probably made the right decision to rescue my family from the infernal sectarianism and hate that prevail in our society. I heard that the house where my family and I used to live was burned by the militias a few months after leaving the country. I heard many stories from my neighborhood; frightening stories.
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Darfuris in Cairo
Photographs by Myriam Abdelaziz
This series of environmental portraits of refugees from Darfur was shot in February 2008, in housing projects near abandoned factories on the outskirts of Cairo.
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Olympic Garden
Video and text by Rana el-Nemr
The “Olympic Garden” is a 7minute long 3-channel loop of still photographs, text & sound.
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Spatial Design and Social Control: Collective Towns in Iraqi Kurdistan
Francesca Recchia and Anna Wachtmeister in conversation with Azad Shekhani
Photography by Ehsan Maleki
Researchers Francesca Recchia and Anna Wachtmeister engaged in a collaborative investigation of the spatial, economic and social implications of the massive relocation project of the Ba'athist regime in Iraq employed in the northern region of Kurdistan. This is a conversation conducted with urban researcher Azad Shekhani, it begins with a historical reconstruction of Collective Towns from their original socialist ideal in the 1970s to their use as a territorial device of social, political and ethnic control.
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The Serving Line at Q-West
Text and videos by Lee Wang
In order to maintain the war in Iraq, U.S. military bases have been transformed into fortified mini-Americas that serve the comforts of coffee and fast food to soldiers on endless deployment. Filmmaker Lee Wang recounts her experiences with the military's new service economy during a trip to Iraq in 2006.
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X-Mission
Video and text by Ursula Biemann
The refugee camp encapsulates crucial features of our political planet – refugees are suspended from political rights and placed under quarantine in the political regime of nation states. In that regard, the refugee camp is above all, a capsule. A capsule where populations are suspended from the legal order that governs their lives, defined and regulated according to the United Nations’ humanitarian conventions and the volatile domain of international politics.
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Reconstructing and Governing Nahr el-Bared Camp: Bridge or Barrier to Inclusion?
Text by Sari Hanafi
This paper is about the saga of Nahr el-Bared, its destruction, looting and difficult postwar negotiation and reconstruction. The discussion is also intended to be conversant with current debates on governance and its iteration in the Vienna Document (issued in June of 2008) and the Lebanese government’s policies and scope of actions regarding camps in general, and Nahr el-Bared in particular. This study is based on two years of fieldwork and action-research, it involved in-depth interviews with Nahr el-Bared dwellers and community leaders as well as close observation of people during the process of planning for the reconstruction.
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Interview with Ismael Sheikh Hassan
by Rasha Salti
Ismael Sheikh Hassan is the architect and planner working as a coordinator between the Nahr el-Bared Reconstruction Commission for Civil Action and Studies (NBRC) and the UNRWA's Design and Camp Improvement Units on the reconstruction of Nahr el-Bared. He, as all members of the NBRC, are volunteers, and have been now involved in this initiative for more than two years and the half. Rasha Salti drove to the outskirts of Tripoli, to listen to his story, meet the team, and transcribe an insider's experience.
Ink sketches by Saba Innab
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Nahr al-Bared Camp: Transitions
a-films
This short film, produced in October 2008, documents the experiences and thoughts of several young residents of Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, as they talk about current developments in the camp and their personal situation.
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Spatial Erasure: Reconstruction Projects in Beirut
by Mona Fawaz and Marwan Ghandour
Mona Fawaz and Marwan Ghandour focus on two of the main postwar reconstruction projects that have marked Beirut’s urbanization since the end of its civil war in 1990. The first project undertook the reconstruction of Beirut’s downtown, starting in 1994 by a private real-estate company, Solidere, and the second reconstruction project was initiated by Jihad al-Bina’ (a Hezbollah affiliated NGO specializing in development projects and post-war reconstruction building works) in the neighborhood of Haret Hreik in Southern Beirut in the aftermath of the 2006 Israeli summer war on Lebanon.
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Extra-Territorial Experience: Difference, Global Circuits, Amateurs and the Ethic of Design
by Ozayr Saloojee
Ozayr Saloojee teaches architecture at the University of Minnesota's College of Design, and has held a long-standing interest in conflict landscapes. This text was motivated by issues raised in a third year graduate research studio that asked students to engage with contested urban sites as a way to catalyze an 'ethical imagination.' Wrestling with issues of proximity and distance and how to actively and responsibly participate in distant contexts, students were confronted with profound questions of how to 'read,' 'understand,' and suggest possibilities for engaging in programs, sites and circumstances that they could not easily access - both physically and intellectually. Their provocations were inspired by a broadly diverse set of political, economic, social and historical conditions around the world, yet all projects felt a consistent conceptual orbit around the issue of extra-territoriality, and of the deeply human consequence of their selected sites. This essay reflects on the moral and ethical imperative of how we, as designers and students, engage with a very real world that is ordinarily seen as too distant from our immediate selves and communities, and sometimes, not seen at all.
*Molly Eagen, a student entering her thesis semester, investigated with remarkable nuance and sensitivity, the question of refugees in Iraq following the Obama administration's proposed troop withdrawal in 2011. Sample images from her research and design work are attached as a downloadable pdf.
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Photographic Conversation
Project by Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh
Burj al-Shamali, is one of the twelve official Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. The aim of the Photographic Conversation I initiated was not to teach technical skills in photography, the idea was mainly to look at photographs and discuss them in order to understand people's relationship to images in general and their own representation in particular. Until today it is not very clear to me why those I worked with, quickly developed projects structured as endless series. The first series are by Susan al-Khatib. She was the first who started producing images in series. In a very systematical way she went around the camp and photographed doors, one after the other.
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