Design for Change: Mapping Life Under Occupation

How do you shape a life under occupation? How do you turn a place to live into a home when it was never intended that you would live there permanently? In this edition of Design for Change, Palestinian-Dutch guest speakers reflect on how creative practices such as architecture and artistic research give meaning to places of residence and landscapes shaped by displacement, boundaries, and resilience.

Guided by cultural and media scholar and lecturer Jamil Fiorino-Habib, the guests explore from a design perspective what it entails to live under occupation and how art and design offer alternative conceptions of land, temporality, and belonging. Each in their own way, they respond to the tension between living and lived environments and the societal, political, and cultural cartography projected onto them.

Architecture researcher and lecturer Nama’a Qudah obtained her PhD in 2024 based on research into a Palestinian refugee camp that has grown into a densely populated residential neighborhood. Originally ‘temporary’ shelter made of canvas gave way to concrete shelters, through which successive generations are constructing an increasingly permanent infrastructure for a life against which the formal, political temporality of their stay stands in stark contrast.

Artist, architect, and researcher Areej Ashab addresses subjects in her work such as the loss of material heritage, more-than-human living environments, and the way communities and governments deal with territory. Through film, text, and communal activities such as walks, she captures lost Palestinian landscapes and refutes anthropocentric and colonial bias regarding barren landscapes and an equally infertile future.

Reclaiming Space // Reclaiming Narrative

Unfortunately, architecture functions not only as a neutral backdrop or as an approach to surviving, understanding, and combating an existence under occupation, but is also actively deployed as an instrument of colonial violence. On the day of this event, Reclaiming Space // Reclaiming Narrative also opens at 18:00hr in the Re-Centre of the Nieuwe Instituut. In this exhibition, TU Delft students present work in which they critically engage with the use of spatial means such as settlements, border posts, spatial planning, and military infrastructure to fragment, displace, and erase Palestinian life.

No registration required to join this opening moment at the Re-Centre.

Design for Change

Part of the Design for Change series, the evening invites designers, architects, artists and the public to consider how design and spatial research can help us understand—and challenge—the political realities embedded in the spaces around us.

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Host or Publisher Netwerk Archieven Design & Digitale Cultuur