Artist books
Other forms of restoration
Other Forms of Restoration is an exploration into the poetics of restoring an adobe building. By taking reference to the dominant themes of loss and memory in arabic poetry that relate to the changing states of being, I begin to employ poetry as a form of writing that responds to the abandoned adobe structures in Umm Slaim. The poems are casted with earthen bricks that are made to reconstruct parts of a mud-house. The poems written in response to the site touch on both the physical and intangible spatial narratives of the place. It is a collaborative project that looks into the politics and displacement of earth as a material, as well as the implications of language in altering our perceptions of sites and memories. Umm Slaim is a neighborhood situated in the historic district south-west of the city. It continues to house a number of communities that are mostly still living in original adobe structures. These spaces hold testimony to the native architectural practices that have preceded the city’s post-oil expansion. The exploration starts with the site of a two-story mud-house sliced through its center, but a part of the house remains with its original interiors. It was demolished to make room for a parking lot, and a significant number of adobe structures continue to disappear in the face of gentrification and rapid commercial redevelopment. The writing ultimately aims to connect poetry with the spatial, political, and cultural circumstances of the site in both materialism and consciousness. In light of rapid flux and expansion, it becomes apparent that what we sometimes succeed in keeping elements in our built environment that are negligible compared to what we might lose.
Building voids Building voids explores the lost narrative of desert landscapes in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in the form of site-writing. A genre that enables us to articulate knowledge as a transformative process of meaningmaking the spatial qualities of writing. The work aims to address the existential relationship and the interpersonal silences between architecture and the earth. In this exploration, I begin to analyze the displaced landscapes that inhabit a residential neighborhood Al Narjis in the northern area of the city, where it is undergoing a development project that neglects its desert landscape by erasing its topography. I intend to invite reflection on the abusive exploitation of land and critically examine the effects of urban sprawl and expansion in the city. The visual tensions generated from the sliced landscapes offer an insight into the violent practices of property developers against nature. The ecologically ruinous approach to development results in the indefinite breakage of earth as land and material. Desert landscapes are often perceived as secondary in the classification of nature that is worth preserving, in many cases they are almost disregarded as nature. These landscapes are more than dramatic escarpments, desert biomes are crucial to the plant’s ecosystem. The intertextuality and the constructing of various voices as a way of positioning, where interwoven perspectives help shape my understanding of the evident loss of topographical identity in this era of accelerated development. In light of rapid flux and expansion, it becomes apparent that what we succeed in keeping elements in our landscape that are negligible compared to what we might lose. The work speaks to the larger community of the city and the ecological victims of negligence and consumption.