Building as Destroying, Destroying as Building: Talk by Saba Innab

Building as Destroying, Destroying as Building is constructed around two imaginaries: the imaginary of the museum as a “coloniser”, and the imaginary of the land as a source of incessant knowledge that resists its demise and appropriation. Using the vertical section of a typical Palestinian peasant house as a starting point, Innab’s talk reveals multiple layers and interpretations of know-how embedded in place, as well as the possibilities for anti-colonial resistance that this knowledge harbours.

Innab situates her preoccupation with dwelling, building, and latent architectural know-how in Palestine within a trans-historical analysis that links settler-colonial land grabs to successive forms of land reform. Such an analysis cannot be separated from the imagined “emptying” of land—an imaginary that precedes and enables the material dispossession and destruction enacted through capital extraction and colonial occupation.