Last week the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA) participated in the first of three collaborative seminars to take place in various locations throughout the Middle East. Each day provided us with a different frame for entering into a series of discussions around the theme of “Returns” with our local interlocutors (whom I unfortunately cannot name personally and thank individually). In a sense the trip was structured as a series of mobile platforms whereby local participants presented their work and ideas with participants from RA responding to and inserting their own work into the discussions as they unfolded.

We began with an exhibition curated by media theorist Ariella Azoulay at “Zochrot”, an Israeli NGO in Tel Aviv that has worked to generate greater awareness of the “Nakba” or Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. For the exhibition Azoulay culled images from various official archives detailing the formation of the State of Israel that she then reorganised into new taxonomic categories to provide a series of counter-testimonials that reveals the acts of extreme violence perpetrated against the Palestinian people. The curating of these images into new assemblages of expression, in effect, allows us to see through them, to read them against the grain so to speak and thus generate new meanings and alternate insights into certain prevailing conceptions of history. As Azoulay states the difference between “what was seen by whom” was configured as an optical form of colonial aphasia “between those who see the disaster that befell the Palestinians as a catastrophe (from every conceivable human perspective), and those who see no catastrophe or, at best, see “catastrophe from their point of view.”

From Tel Aviv we literally travelled into and through the cartography of Eyal Weizman’s book "Hollow Land": from the Israeli forestation projects along the highway towards Jerusalem, which converted grazing land into a hostile acidic landscape of occupation and covered-over razed Palestinian villages; to the intricate topo-political configurations of the land as we moved both over and under Palestinian territories enroute to the West Bank. While "Hollow Land" set up the spatial narratives of the trip for many of us in advance, the realties on the ground vastly complicated the nature of our encounters, which could no longer be distributed into a series of discrete chapters. What I had previously entered into only through language and a "culture of distance" now made itself felt in very urgent and immediate ways. This experience was an important reminder for the need to develop relations of proximity to my own research materials and subjects - an obvious point I know but a fundamental distinction with respect to my/our travels together thereafter.

If "Hollow Land" was the initial entry point, our first stop at the Dheisheh Refugee Camp in the West Bank was the crucial turning point for setting up the remainder of our collaborative seminars. In particular, the spatial forces that connect the camp to the immediacy of its local environment were understood as radically assisting in reconfiguring the category of the refugee from one of victim (as was later presented in Amman in a discussion of refugee camps in Lebanon), that is, from an externally constructed designation to an internally reformulated one. The refugees in the Dheisheh, in spite of their extended internment, are understood as agents of their own self-representation. This seminar in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp was thus enormously significant because it laid out a political framework and became the lens through which the rest of our discussions were continually refracted.

The next morning was spent walking through various areas of Ramallah guided by an artist/urbanist who eventually joined us for our final seminars in Amman where he presented his photographic proposal around the idea of “The Politics of the Unnecessary” which re-imagined a refugee camp that was structurally colourised by its inhabitants as an expression of a kind of exuberance that made explicit the narratives of ownership and historical affiliations around the right of return. At the end of 6 days of seminars in which the question of intentionality was central to each of the presentations (which is to say that every project we discussed was guided by an abiding concern with its potential transformative outcomes), his provocation provided a “necessary” space for conceptualizing the possibility that something unexpected and wondrous could take place, even in a zone of crisis, that somehow exceeded the purely rational and the instrumental. But I’m jumping far ahead. . . with this artist/urbanist as our guide we also visited the former compound and now epic tomb of Yasser Arafat, then eventually made our way to the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre for another series of seminars which included discussions around the upcoming audio project “The Ramallah Syndrome: The Art of Conversation” to be presented at the Venice Biennale in June. One of its members is a Ramallah-based rapper and sound artist who also scored the indie documentary “Chronicles of a Refugee”.

In terms of the contributions of RA, our responses often functioned as shifters rather than as direct interventions into the discussions at hand. For example, a presentation by Celine Condorelli on “support” quickly migrated into a heated debate around the role of NGO’s and their governance structures with respect to questions around the nature of support and its political efficacies/deficiencies. Angela Melitopolous inserted a series of theoretical provocations that also helped to move the discussions in very generative ways at critical points. As Irit Rogoff has mentioned (here I am relaying a personal conversation) the threshold condition of “crisis” as the paradigm that matters also needs to be flexible enough and even at times challenged in order to be able to open up other points of access and/or spaces for thinking and consequently other modes of action.

From our intensive experiences at the Dheisheh Refugee Camp we also spent a morning walking through the Shu'fat Refugee Camp guided by two architecture students, who were themselves working on a massive urban redevelopment proposal for the camp based on its strategic location within the region. This day operated on an altogether different register and included a seminar on the proposed master-plan for the city of Jerusalem, which involves the active participation of Senan Abdelkader a renowned Palestinian architect; a decision of complicity on his part that is clearly not immune to criticism, but one which he felt was important to make precisely because it is so politically fraught. That afternoon stands somewhat in contradistinction to the discussions that unfolded at the Dheisheh and consequently produced another useful point of reflection and comparison.

Each day involved a complex series of passages through various military checkpoints. Given our mixed political constituency this what not without its daily stresses and near-misses. "Close the curtains on the bus!" Our strategy was always to send a collection of diverse passports towards the front of the bus. Confronted with so many global passports in various languages, the sheer volume of official documents seemed to counteract the need to scrutinize each of our passengers individually. For once the tedium of mass bureaucracy played into our hands, although this would not be the case when it came to crossing into Jordan for one of our participants who was temporarily delayed by authorities. On another occasion when returning in taxis one night from Jerusalem to Ramallah both of our taxis got lost. Stranded by the side of the road we were eventually questioned by the police of the Palestinian Authority who decided to lead us back to our hotel in a rather bizarre but kindly convoy.

From Ramallah we then made our way through various checkpoints and border crossings into Jordan and onto Amman. Rising out the desert landscape, Amman epitomizes the architectural future defined by the excesses of petroleum-derived capital that Senan Abdelkader is adamant about refusing as a Palestinian model of urbanization, which to some degree he already sees happening in his critique of Ramallah. "I'm not interested in building more discos" he stated, but clearly musicians such as the "Ramallah Underground" (some of whose members we met) see it differently. In Amman we connected with other academics, artists, and activists from Beirut as well as from Cairo. Here the discussion around the refugee shifted. Counter to the example at Dheisheh, in Lebanese camps the category of the refugee as a “victim” (inculcated by UNRWA) dominated. This category it was argued could not provide any of the conceptual resources necessary for engendering agency, nor for asserting and reclaiming self-identity. Once again, the members of RA were in the privileged position of meeting yet another group of extremely accomplished people whose personal and professional narratives and related projects were key testimonials to the question of "returns" that we were collectively returning to each day. In particular one presenter spoke about her somewhat unusual research methods which involved hanging around in the lobby of a Hezbollah office building simply observing the comings and goings over time which allowed her to narrate a story of urban redevelopment (after the Israeli airstrikes into Lebanon in 2006) that would have been impossible had she sought to gain access through official communication channels. Once again I was reminded that all researchers need to remain open to different kinds of practices; that we must refrain from selecting certain practices as more relevant or legitimate than others. By rejecting practices (those that are not steeped in empiricism for example) we also loose valuable tools for thinking. Hanging out in a lobby and simply observing produced a kind of knowledge that standard research protocols would have likely been unable to generate.

I should mention that though our days were filled with extended seminars and discussions there was still a strong social dimension to all of our encounters, which included some amazing meals and at times too much raki. The highlight no doubt was an Iraqi fish restaurant in Amman that served a splayed and grilled river fish whose curtailed life cycle we witnessed directly next door. Drizzled with lemon and accompanied by a kind of mezze assortment with enormous flat bread - this meal will no doubt become legendary in the chronicles of RA which has a long-standing proclivity for wondrous food and drink.

Throughout the days of our collective seminars in Tel Aviv, the West Bank, and Amman it was these experiences of generosity, coupled with a robust intellectual and creative commitment on the part of our many local interlocutors that stands out for me above all others. We met exceptional people who welcomed us and travelled with us, who shared their experiences with us under conditions that were at times very difficult for them. I thank them for the many challenges they undertook in helping to shape this compelling series of encounters and hope that we will be able to “return” some of this hospitality and critical sustenance in the future.