Description
Book SynopsisColonial and imperial powers have often portrayed arid lands as “empty” spaces ready to be occupied, exploited, extracted, and polluted. Despite the undeniable presence of human and nonhuman lives and forces in desert territories, the “regime of emptiness” has inhabited, and is still inhabiting, many imaginaries.
Deserts Are Not Empty challenges this colonial tendency, questions its roots and ramifications, and remaps the representations, theories, histories, and stories of arid lands—which comprise approximately one-third of the Earth’s land surface. The volume brings together poems in original languages, conversations with collectives, and essays by scholars and professionals from the fields of architecture, architectural history and theory, curatorial studies, comparative literature, film studies, landscape architecture, and photography. These different approaches and diverse voices draw on a framework of decoloniality to unsettle and unlearn the desert, opening up possibilities to see, think, imagine it otherwise.
With contributions from Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, Menna Agha, Asaiel Al Saeed, Aseel AlYaqoub, Yousef Awaad Hussein, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Danika Cooper, Brahim El Guabli, Timothy Hyde, Jill Jarvis, Bongani Kona, Dalal Musaed Alsayer, Observatoire des armements, Francisco E. Robles, Paulo Tavares, Alla Vronskaya, and XqSu.
Trade Review[
Deserts Are Not Empty] is a terrific compilation of essays that allow us to rethink how the desert has been transformed from an actual condition to an idea in service of extractive politics. -- Ali Ismail Karimi * The Atchitect's Newpaper *
Table of Contents1. Against the Regime of “Emptiness”
Samia Henni
2. Desert Futures Collective
A Conversation with Brahim El Guabli, Jill Jarvis,
and Francisco E. Robles
3. It Is Not a Desert Where Grandmother Sits
Menna Agha
4. Drawing Deserts, Making Worlds
Danika Cooper
5. Imperial Desert Effect: Palestine Is There, Where It Had Always Been
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
6. Space Wars: An Investigation into Kuwait's Hinterland
A Conversation with Saphiya Abu Al-Maati, Asaiel Al Saeed, Aseel AlYaqoub, and Yousef Awaad Hussein
7. The Colonial-Modern Politics of Desertification (Notes on the Past and the Future of the Amazon Forest)
Paulo Tavares
8. Overland There’s Shorter Time to Dream
XqSu
9. Archives of Forgetfulness
A Conversation with Bongani Kona
10. Anywhere, USA: Aramco’s Housing in Saudi Arabia’s Desert
Dalal Musaed Alsayer
11. The White Sea Canal and the Rhetorical Desertification of Karelia
Alla Vronskaya
12. Architecture Adrift in the Antarctic Desert
Timothy Hyde
13. Observatoire des armements
