Alessandro Petti
Alessandro Petti is an architect who combines theoretical research with an architectural, artistic, and pedagogical practice engaged in the struggle for justice and equality. In 2012 with Sandi Hilal he founded “Campus in Camps,” an experimental educational program in the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. Through collective discussions and courses, the program transforms notions of “space” and “agency” into practical, community-driven spatial and social solutions. These interventions surpass conventional education by creating a space for critical and grounded knowledge production. His aim is greater transformation and democratization of society.
Five years earlier with Sandi Hilal and Eyal Weizman, Petti created the “Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency” in Beit Sahour, Palestine, an architectural studio and residency program that has gathered architects, artists, activists, urbanists, filmmakers, and curators to work collectively on politics and architecture. DAAR explores possibilities for the reuse, subversion, and transmutation of structures of domination: from evacuated military bases to refugee camps, from uncompleted government buildings to the remains of destroyed villages. In 2014 they published Architecture After Revolution, revisiting today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also as a continued struggle for decolonization.
Petti’s participation in contemporary art exhibitions-among them the Biennale di Venezia, Istanbul Biennial, Home Works Beirut, Bienal de Sao Paulo, Marrakech, Qalandia and the Asian Art Biennial-have had practical implications for architectural interventions in the refugee camps. In 2014 the Shu’fat School for Girls was inaugurated as an expression of the dignity and strength of the refugee community living in overcrowded camps. A “Concrete Tent” erected in the Dheisheh camp in 2015 embodies the contradiction of the permanent temporariness of Palestinian refugees.
The Loeb Fellowship provides Petti with the opportunity to reflect on the contemporary refugee condition and displacement not only as a humanitarian problem, but also as a social, spatial, cultural, and political challenge from which new claims can be made for a more just and equal city and society. He will work on an exhibition and publication that probe the paradoxes and the potential of an “Architecture of Exile.”