online workshops

THE PLACELESS ACADEMY

with inputs by Hakim Benchekroun, Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski, Amalie Elfalah, Imad Dahmani, Caroline Jäger-Klein, Oliver Sukrow

mentored by Fatimzahra Benhamza, Sarri Elfaitouri, Negar Hakim

Saturday, 25/03/2023, 2-4 pm

Sunday, 26/03/2023, 10 am  – 12 pm

Saturday. 01/04/2023, 1-4 pm

The Placeless Academy is a digital platform that aims to analyze and critique the legacy of architecture in the WANA-region, and produce alternative critical canons beyond the Western colonial conception of modernity. Countries in North Africa, have a rich modern heritage built in the twentieth century, which is for a large part endangered. Many historical buildings were replaced by new buildings and infrastructure due to three main reasons: the need for more space in urban centers, the lack of awareness of the importance of heritage and, in some cases, a rejection of the colonial past. The project offers a space to deal with these issues through research and offers architects, artists and people interested who are based in Libya, Morocco, and Austria critical tools, mentorship and the possibility to establish a contemplative cross-cultural dialogue.

architects and researchers

HAKIM BENCHEKROUN

Arch. Hakim Benchekroun lives and works in Rabat. After training as an architect, it is through photography and visual arts that His artistic expression is revealed. His photographic work leads him to explore, in a kind of cardinal obsession, territories of obsolescence, towards the intimate knowledge of a forgotten Morocco, embodied in his project «Lost in Morocco». His work has been exhibited and published in Morocco and internationally, notably on the occasion of the exhibition «Le Maroccontemporain» at the at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris in 2015, or at the Biennale of Photography of Bamako in 2022. Healso won the first prize of the «Photographic Nights of Essaouira» in 2017.

CRUZ GARCIA AND NATHALIE FRANKOWSKI

Prof.Cruz Garcia and Nathalie Frankowski are Associate Professors at Iowa State University, where they are Design for Critical Futures in Activism and Emancipatory Practice fellows respectively, and faculty at Columbia University. They are authors of Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto, Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture, A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, and the upcoming book Universal Principles of Architecture.

AMALIE ELFALAH

Arch. Amalie Elfalah is an interdisciplinary architecture/ urban designer and independent early-career researcher examining socio-spatial constructions, actualities, and imaginations of Italian colonial Libya (1911-1943). Her research questions ‘modernist’ discourse and environments rooted in ‘difficult heritage’ concurrently tracing how colonization is concealed/embodied, forgotten/ remembered, and erased/concretized in contemporary [post]colonial Italy and Libya.

IMAD DAHMANI

Arch. Imad Dahmani is a moroccan architect based in Casablanca. Graduated from the Casablanca School of Architecture (eac) in 2015, his thesis was on brutalist architecture in Morocco 1950-1970, he then moved to Paris to work for «Architecture Studio».In 2017, he joined «MAG Architecture», in Casablanca. He is a professor at EAC, Co-founder and President of the MAMMA association.He created in 2020 his own architecture studio, atelier Dahmani and is now pursuing a specialized master degree at ENA Rabat in association with Chaillot city in Paris.

CAROLINE JÄGER-KLEIN

Prof.Jäger-Klein became a member of ICOMOS Austria in 2003 at the suggestion of Professor Eduard Sekler, Harvard and a long-standing UNESCO advisor. In 2013 she chaired the ICOMOS Southeast Europe Regional Conference in Vienna, in 2014 she founded the ICOMOS Group of Kosovo, and in 2019 initiated and chaired the ICOMOS Southeast Europe Regional Conference in Kotor, Montenegro. The ICOMOS Heritage Alert triggered in 2015 for today’s OttoWagner Hospital Am Steinhof in Vienna isbased on her (together with Plakolm-Forsthuber) scientific research and documentation of the building history of the area, which was published by Birkhäuser in 2014. studied architecture at the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Michigan.

OLIVER SUKROW

Dr. Oliver Sukrow is a project assistant (postdoc) in the FWF third-party funded project «Transnational school building: Austria, Slovenia, GDR» in the research department of art history at the Vienna University of Technology and is currently a fellow of the Wüstenrot Foundation.2012-2016 he was a doctoral student at the Institute for European Art History at the University of Heidelberg. 2016-2020 he was a university assistant in the art history research department at the Vienna University of Technology.In 2018 his doctoral thesis was published under the title “Work. Reside.Computer On the utopia in the fine arts and architecture of the GDR in the 1960s» at Heidelberg University Press. His habilitation project deals with health resorts in the 19th/20th centuries as alternative spaces for innovation.

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