Studying child’s play counters any idea that play is something minor, of no value, dismissable. This design research project looks at children’s play in violent contexts with a new lens, drawing attention to its material, temporal and architectural dimensions, in search of alternative modes of reading and engagement with a child’s built environment. What can we learn or gain from narrating Palestine through a child’s point of view by bringing attention to their games and playing territories? In her 2002 novella, Masās (Touch), Adania Shibli portrays a child, overlooked by her elder family members, mirroring the intergenerational social tensions and the internal dynamics of family relations in times of crisis. 2 The interplay between individual subject and collective memory, children’s world with that of the adults, shows the Palestinian situation through the eyes of a child. In a series of fragmentary scenes of the child’s daily encounters, she listens to adults, or witnesses some traumatic event unfolding in front of her eyes while not fully understanding their meaning. Touching on the absurdities of social and political rules, the child finds herself in humorous, sometimes painful, situations when she encounters these rules – living her own intimate world despite feeling the agony in the background. Shibli shows children negotiating the adult world and an imposed environment through play, combining the
factual and fictional, tragedy and irony. She narrates a series of experiential situations through a child’s pre-meditated view – a not-fully-cultured look, revealing a lot about the charged environment and its complex realities. This way, Shibli goes beyond the interiority of everyday life to reach the interiority of the child herself when encountering harsh spatial conditions and social relationships in the family. 3 Shibli’s novella was written in the particular context of the Second Intifada; prevailing anxieties of that time reflect Palestinian fragmented identity and alienation of children in the third or fourth generation after el-Nakba. 4 In this project, fragments and residual traces of daily life construct constellations of images, texts and relics related to particular Palestinian conditions at certain times. 5 These assemblages work as material thinking experiments in dialogue with the interiority of the child and the subjectivities of anyone who interacts with the boxes. Though bounded by the edges of the box, situated material objects and charged relics reveal relationships with larger contexts and real-world spatial conditions. There is a reciprocal relationship between miniature toys inside each box and distant inaccessible places and times.
all images Samer Wanan
The common thread among all five generations is the Palestinian aspiration for liberation and justice, though with different approaches to achieve this ultimate goal and the not-yet-attainable future. Each generation sees the next one, their children, as the source and symbol of hope, believing that they will continue their struggle to be called jīl el-tahrir (the generation of liberation). The word tahrir carries ideas of freedom and futurity within its folds, a myriad of possibilities to speculate about and (re)write the end of the open-ended story. It is not a coincidence that the word for editing a text and re-writing a story in Arabic is also tahrir . 5 In Walter Benjamin’s sense - one interested in the refuse of history, of modernity, of the city, see Chapter 10 ‘Rag-picking: The Arcades Project’ in Walter Benjamin’s Archive: images, texts, signs . Verso Books, 2015.
2 Shibli, Adania. Touch. translated by Paula Haydar. Northampton MA: Interlink Publishing, 2013 3 In Arabic, the word Masā s literally means to be touched by devils or magic, and hence, being mentally affected to the point of insanity, in Arabic: jonna – the state of seeing, thinking and imagining reality in a different way than it really is. The word is also linked to love and poetry in Arabic culture to connotate a person being touched by love. In a sense, it reaches metaphysical, psychological and mental levels to mean touching the soul. 4 The Palestinian story can be narrated as a series of vignettes in relation to its generations. Jīl, means a generation when a group of people inhabits a space and a time frame within a narrative, primarily during their childhood. In the Palestinian case, we say jīl qabl el- Nakba (prior to the 1948 catastrophe), jīl el-Nakba (the generation who witnessed the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe and the aftermath of displacement), jīl al-fida’iyin (post-1967 ‘Naksa’ era and the launch of armed struggle), jīl el-intifada I (post-1987 uprising), jīl el-intifada II (post-2000 uprising).
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on site review 44 : play
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