Dwelling in the Imaginary of the Land: A Public Lecture by Saba Innab

As a supposed critical method, does the act of "rethinking" within the same power and epistemic structures solidify the status quo of perpetual defeat? That is, can a tool liberate itself from the authority of the epistemic structure that produced it, or necessarily remain captive to it? For example, how to produce a map that overruns its inherent authority, colonialism, nationalism, capitalism, etc.

Learning from the camp, the process of collecting and reclaiming place from the memory of the people of Nahr al-Bared Palestinian Refugee Camp, specifically inspired an imagining of return. It became a process of assembling dwelling - and its impossibility - as a means of generating knowledge that rethinks the relationship between margins and centers.
The narration engages critically with a mental map of Nahr al-Bared, a map drawn, validated and retrieved by its displaced residents from memory during its destruction in the summer of 2007. The map represents a collective act of resistance against material and future erasure - that is, planned erasure through displacement or through the replacement of the old fabric with a model camp. The map manifests the return to the second home - the camp - as a prerequisite for returning to the first home - Palestine - by defining the path of the reconstruction of the camp.
This assembling/collecting unfolds into architectural moments that link the concept of dwelling to time and to temporalities, as an imaginary that resists both ongoing displacement and stillness while implicitly envisioning return. This assemblage has taken shape through writing, model-making, and the study of spaces, drawing on oral history, on memory - or its absence - and on the interrogation of absences.

As an attempt to move beyond the limits of imagination or memory, the model - or rather, the rethinking of the model and expression through it - emerges as a tool for capturing this knowledge, much as we rethink the margin itself. Different models take form through the deconstruction of spatial-architectural moments and their transformation into angles and materials, revealing further layers: the land, estrangement, inherited knowledge, latent knowledge, and attempts to interrogate the unknown in contexts of exile and displacement.

Saba Innab is a Palestinian architect, artist, and researcher based between Beirut and Amman. Her multidisciplinary practice engages questions of land imaginaries, modes of building and dwelling, and the temporalities of refugeehood and displacement under settler-colonial occupation and capitalist extraction. Working across historical research, drawing, mapping, model-making, and spatial interventions, Innab explores suspended states between temporariness and permanence. Her work interrogates shifting notions of dwelling and building and their political, spatial, and poetic implications in both language and architecture. In 2019, she co-founded OPPA for Research and Architecture, a collective based in Amman.

Her solo exhibitions include: Tread Lightly - Leave No Trace at daadgalerie Berlin 2023, Station Point at ifa-Galerie Berlin 2019, Al Rahhalah at Marfa’ Beirut 2016, and No-Sheep’s Land at Darat al Funun Amman 2011. Her group exhibitions include: The Production of Otherness at FAD 2021, the 57th edition of Carnegie International at Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh 2018, Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans at Frac Centre-Val de Loire Orléans 2017, and the Marrakech Biennial in Marrakech 2016.

**Image from Tomorrow, Poetry Will (Not) Be the House of Life, 2017

This lecture will be held in Arabic and is free and open to the public, but registration is required:
https://forms.gle/91P6opkS9H8YVhgZ7