Oshinowo, with exhibition designers Space Caviar, outfitted this courtyard for socializing around a coffee and juice bar, as well as bringing large groups together for panels, workshops, and lectures. There was almost no artificial lighting, but open clerestories allow air flow and heat release, and perforated walls both let in light and enable for natural ventilation. But the school itself is emblematic of the passive vernacular architecture of the region that adapts to the extreme heat and sun of the desert peninsula. Oshinowo grounded us in SAT’s main hall, the newly renovated courtyard of Al Qasimiyah School, which hosts 19 of the triennial’s 30 installations. But the very base of the triennial project serves as an oasis in turbulent times: Oshinowo asserted in her opening remarks that “this is a space for solidarity and a space for peace.” Projects that may have felt conceptual or historical a year ago were now read as solutions and calls to action, not to mention being emotional encounters for viewers and participants alike. With several participants either being from Palestine or working with marginalized Palestinian communities, the work, of course assembled years prior to October 7, suddenly took on additional urgency. The opening took place during the war in Gaza, and SAT staff and participants were unified in their support for Palestine and their condemnation of violence. She said that this vision “embraces the idea that nothing can be permanent, and that everything in our environment should adapt to conditions of scarcity in order to match our realities and needs, thereby resulting in a progressive and evolving architecture.” COLLAB: Henry Glogau & Aleksander Kongshaug, Resource Autonomy at Al Qasimiyah School (© Sharjah Architecture Triennial/Danko Stjepanovic) As Oshinowo wrote in her curatorial statement, “Scarcity has engendered a culture of re-use, re-appropriation, innovation, and collaboration.” She is discussing the Global South, and in particular her country of Nigeria, but in many ways SAT is a looking glass through which the entire globe will begin to see the effects of extraction, depletion, and climate change. This year, participants coalesced around themes of reuse and adaptation in myriad ways grounded in the soon-to-be global condition of precarity and scarcity. Spread across the “dry” (no alcohol) and relatively conservative emirate in the process of solidifying its reputation as the artistic and cultural center of the UAE, four main sites of activation posit new futures for the Sharjah locally, and the Global South generally, through the display of architectural imagination. The Ghost Village hosts DAAR’s moving installation, Concrete Tent, but acts as a much larger metaphor for curator and Nigerian architect Tosin Oshinowo’s theme: The Beauty of Impermanence.Īre all architects trying to create “constructive and suggestive utopias?” This musing by Oshinowo opened SAT on November 10. Eventually they chose to stop fighting the landscape.Īll aspects of Al-Madam’s story-its legacy and critique, plus its location and community-make it emblematic of the themes for the second iteration of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT). It was a constant battle against the ever-accumulating sands. Though the concrete homes represented a “modern” lifestyle, the tribe attempted to explain that the desert was moving around them. But by the early 1990s, the entire town was abandoned. The village was planned and constructed in the mid-1970s as a permanent residence for the Al Ketbi tribe. The Ghost Village is a living reminder of the failures of modernism. DAAR, Sandi Hilal & Alessandro Petti, Concrete Tent at Al Madam (© Sharjah Architecture Triennial/Danko Stjepanovic) Mounds of the desert pile up to the rafters, leaving only the occasional doorway or window frame open as winds shift the stuff throughout town. But it’s all buried in reddish sand, eerie and abandoned. Al-Madam is home to the Ghost Village, a small collection of concrete homes clustered around a path and central square.
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