Aria Gilani

Aria Gilani (US) is an architect and artist working across performance, scenography, and curation. Trained first as a journalist and later as an architect, she follows the thread of space as both subliminal framing device and overt enabler of every form of living relation.

She has worked with art collectives, theatres, museums, and communities in the forms of set and exhibition design, text both fictive and descriptive, and image-based, sensorily-attuned architectural work. All is done in favor of what she finds most beautiful in chaotic times: to translate the complexities of love, hope, and belief into dramatic and emotive gestures that remain true to the now, carefully attentive to the next. She lives and works in Berlin.

SESSIONS

08:45-09:05 (EN)

ARIA GILANI | CONFLICTING TRUTHS

What use is hope in a world on fire? What else but hope can serve that burning world? A brief lecture performance on the dialectic history of “dreaming” as it pertains to the psyche of architecture today, a field wedded to imagination in crisis with reality.

Aria Gilani (US): Architect, Artist, and Co-curator, OPEN26

12:45-13:30 (EN)

YARA SHARIF | RECLAIMING, REMEMBERING, AND REAWAKENING A SCARRED LANDSCAPE

Architects for Gaza’s strategy for healing and empowering the scarred landscapes of Gaza centres on accumulated small-scale, site-specific interventions as an alternative to master plans and a one-size-fits-all approach. At a time when global powers openly call for turning Gaza into a blank canvas and redrawing it, architecture has the potential to challenge the colonial narrative and hierarchy of knowledge production, exploring repair as resistance, mourning, and continuity.

Yara Sharif (PS): Architect and Academic, University of Westminster; Co-founder of Palestine Regeneration Team and Architects for Gaza

Moderator: Aria Gilani (US): Architect, Artist, and Co-curator, OPEN26