Refugee Heritage, 2019-21
Working with DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Research) between 2019 and 2021, I travelled on a residency to Palestine to conduct field work and develop collective projects for their project Refugee Heritage.
The project questioned the role of preservation and memory in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, established in 1949 as a direct result of the Nakba. By proposing the camp as a World Heritage Site, it asked how the unacknowledged history of exile might be recognised without diminishing the right of return, and how architecture can serve simultaneously as archive and provocation.
Some of my contributions included mapping routes between Dheisheh and the 44 destroyed villages of origin, speculatively reversing the historical paths of displacement into itineraries of future return. I also produced diagrams for the Three Shelters intervention, where original 1950s UNRWA shelters were documented and reactivated through collective cultural events, before their unexpected demolition raised urgent questions around ownership, preservation, and the vulnerability of shared space in the camp. Alongside this, I developed drawings of the Concrete Tent pavilion at the Edward Said Garden of the al-Feniq Cultural Center, an architectural intervention that materialises both permanence and precarity.
These works were later included in Refugee Heritage, where I also contributed to editing, design, writing, and transcription, situating the camp as both a site of everyday life and a living monument to displacement and resistance.
Mapping of Return
Refugee Heritage Book