Decolonizing Architecture is an architectural collective that combines conceptual speculations and pragmatic spatial interventions, discourse and collective learning. The multi-award artistic research and practice of Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti is situated between politics, architecture, art and pedagogy. In their practice, art exhibitions are both sites of display and sites of action that spill over into other contexts: built architectural structures, the shaping of critical learning environments, interventions that challenge dominant collective narratives, the production of new political imaginations, the formation of civic spaces and the re-definition of concepts.
In 2007, together with Eyal Weizman, they founded DAAR (Decolonising Architecture Art Residency) in Palestine, with the aim to combine an architectural studio and an art residency able to gather architects, artists, activists, urbanists, film-makers, and curators to work collectively on the subjects of politics and architecture.
Their latest publication Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory, Stockholm 2019 ) is a book and an archive that accounts for 15 years of research and creation that are marked by an inner tension and a visionary drive that re-thinks itself through collective engagement.
Petti and Hilal co-authored with Eyal Weizman the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, Berlin 2014), an invitation to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonialism.
Alessandro is a professor of Architecture and Social Justice at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm and Sandi has initiated the living room project, a series of spaces of hospitality that have the potential to subvert the role of guest and host.
COUNTERSPACE 