2025

Location: Amman, Jordan

Exhbition: In That Same Houre (Darat el Funun)

Area: 20 m2

Research Assistance: Ahmad Salah, Manaf Sharaf, Rahaf Wannous, Rose Break, Sadek Jourieh
Visual and Drawing Assistance: Marah Sharabati, Joelle Deeb
Video Production: Ahmad Salah
Construction: Mostafa Shehata

“Building is a reading of what remains of the world after loss. It is an act of continuation; a refusal of new points of beginning, of the very logic of reconstruction, and of the neglect of a long history of attunement between people and their environments. Building today is an act of looking, into ourselves and into what surrounds us, in search of archives that do not serve as neutral records, but as horizons that reopen the possibilities of understanding, imagination, experimentation, and of what might yet come into being.”

Archive of Scarcity offers building craft as a form of thought: an active intelligence that binds memory to imagination, and creativity to the everyday labor of survival.

The installation is based on a long-term research project Cultures of Making. Through fieldwork and collaboration with craftspeople, the project gathers fragments of practice that endure amid fragile social, environmental, and political conditions. In this installation, these fragments come together in an open composition, embodying a dictionary of craft. Each structure, drawing, image, and record reflects an attentiveness to the intelligence carried in materials and gestures that move between hands, places, and generations.

At the core of this research lies a resistance to the modern impulse to begin from scratch. The project instead proposes building upon what already exists, treating the archive as a field of ongoing relations, where making itself sustains continuity. What is passed down becomes material for reinvention; a ground from which new possibilities emerge.

Photos @Hussam Hasan