HOPE
HOPE
What is the role of hope and imagination in times and places when the material reality, alongside the very ideas, of home, cultural heritage, and fundamental human rights are actively threatened?
What is the role of hope and imagination in times and places when the material reality, alongside the very ideas, of home, cultural heritage, and fundamental human rights are actively threatened?
Location: Mock Up (Ground floor)
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
09:45-10:30 (EN)
ANNA PASHYNSKA & TANIA PASHYNSKA | BUILDING A SENSE OF SECURITY
Co-Haty searches for and transforms existing abandoned buildings into co-housing for internally displaced people in Ukraine whose lives have been turned upside-down due to the war. From rubble and destruction the project creates moments of possibility, turning these unlikely sites into places where people can start to imagine (and put into action) the process of rebuilding their lives in real time.
Anna & Tania Pashynska (UA): Co-founders of CO-HATY
Moderator: Anne Mette Boye (DK): City architect, Aarhus Municipality
11:00-11:45 (EN)
MARWA AL-SABOUNI | BUILDING FOR HOPE
In Al-Sabouni’s reading, Syria was not only destroyed by war. It had already been weakened by decades of spatial fragmentation and poor urban governance. Through a rich tapestry of personal experience, unflinching perspective, and unsettling insight, Al-Sabouni further argues that peace and hope are negotiated not only through politics, but also through streets, neighbourhoods, schools, and public spaces. If that is true, how should architects take greater responsibility for the social consequences of what they design, asking how architecture can build peaceful societies, or at least avoid undermining them?
Marwa Al-Sabouni (SY): Architect, urban thinker and author
Moderator: Nora Ramadan Jepsen (DK/EG): Architecture student, Aarhus School of Architecture
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
