“Will the Archive of the Future Contain Our Home?” with Nuha Innab

“Will the Archive of the Future Contain Our Home?” is an ongoing project by Nuha Innab that takes different forms moving between the academic and the experimental. The project aims to critically deconstruct the archive as a reaction to its inherent nature of being based on exclusionary and classist tools that only accommodate one vision of architecture produced through the accumulation of capital. This research raises many questions about the archive of architecture, its tools, and our position as researchers and residents, and the necessity of critiquing the tools of architecture before we critique the tools of the archive, and monitoring the political and economic impact on the image of architecture in the archive. In her talk with makana, Nuha presented her research project in an intimate circle. Nuha Innab: A Palestinian/Jordanian architect and urban researcher based in Amman. She holds a BA in Architecture from the University of Jordan and a Master’s degree in Urbanism from the Universities of Stuttgart/Ain Shams. Innab launched a digital platform in 2018 to archive modern architecture in Amman under the name “PLOT_436”. She published a book using photographic documentation as a research tool, entitled “Traces of Socialism”, funded by Afaq in 2018. She also co-founded the Oppa Research Group for Studies and Architecture with architect Saba Innab, 2019. She is currently working on an ongoing research project (partially funded by Afaq 2023), which responds to the first attempt at archiving, and looks at and imagines the archive of the future as a non-institutional and emancipatory public archive. Photo by Nuha Innab.