URBEGONY:

Is a group of specialists interested and concerned with urbanisation and architecture that
observes spatial, urban, and architectural changes of the built and social environment.

THE PROPOSAL:

A visual and audiovisual collection of investigations aiming to give some insight into the
transforming Syrian identity and its vast future implications.

The exhibition is presented in four entities:

- The Human Library (Maya Ghannoum)

- Their Lost Homes (Sammy Zarka)

- Where Am I? - Who Am I? (Yara Al Heswani)

- In-between (Areej Al Chalabi)

Human Library - By Urbegony Architects Without Borders.Syria
For the London Festival of Architecture 2018

Human library is a project were people can talk to the book or listen to it instead of reading its
pages. Just like in a real library, the Reader of our Human Library can choose from several
titles, the difference between a real library and Human library, is that there are people instead of
books, and instead of reading there is a conversation or an audio played for you to hear. The
reader who comes to our Human Library can chose a title from the Catalog of available Living
Books – our living books will be members of our group - Urbegony - and several Audios recorded
also by Us, that could be played for the users. The selection of Live Books is based on the local
context, about Syria and its Identity and Architecture.

The living library could help others to know our country better and to create a space for dialogue
between people from different backgrounds, this could be one of the best ways to build stronger
social bonds. The Living Library provides a place where you could sit and not just flip pages of
some book but feel the context by hearing the voice of it or make a conversation with it.

Living Books will be played on MP3 files the titles are:

- Home Sweet Home

- A Memory
- The Day that everything changed
- New Life
Along with Two or more members of our team that are able to be at the festival one day in
a week that we could specify later on.

Necessary objects for the Human Library are:

- 4X MP3 devices
- 4X Headphones for each Device
- 2X Stands for the devices and Headphones
- 4X Printed A4 papers with the illustrations describing the subject – each paper will be
above the MP3 device
- Chairs for the Living Book and the Listener in the specific days when our team member
can attend the event
Their Lost Homes - By Urbegony Architects Without Borders.Syria
For the London Festival of Architecture 2018

Their Lost Homes is a drawing from memory survey that discovers homes their people
have left behind during the conflict. The lines of the drawings uncover a transforming
identity of the subject of displacement, as in most cases drawings do not display how
home was but how its loss is experienced through layers of trauma and nostalgia. Each
lost home is paired by a place the same individual currently occupies revealing how one
reconstructs home in exile and continues to see new places through the eyes of
home(?)
The objective of the survey is to emphasize the importance of taking people’s
transforming identity and their complex post-traumatic perception of space into
consideration when planning a post war Syria.
The Necessary objects for the display are A3 and A4 prints.
Where am I? Who am I? - By Urbegony Architects without Borders.Syria
For the London Festival of Architecture 2018

How do our interactions in social and spatial environments relate to who we are?

Where am I? Who am I? Is a visual project aims to focus on the changes in the Syrian human
geography. The relation between social and spatial spheres of existence, in the context of forced
displacement.

Identity problem that faces Syrians who were forced to leave their regions and move to another
different region inside Syria. That post conflict social dynamics should be taking in consideration
when thinking of the future of urban polices in order to achieve spatial justice which will guarantee
the social justice in those regions.

The Necessary objects for project are printed A4 papers.

Floating In-Between- By Urbegony Architects Without Borders.Syria
For the London Festival of Architecture 2018

“Are we here merely because we say: Brook, Bridge, Door, Window, Tree. Or tower...?” Rilke.

We are oriented because we can remember, the thought here is what we remember in our lives?
Complex ideas or we just remember something very real like a brook or a window? Or a sound?
What happens if we witnessed the destruction of what defines our identity.

Floating In-Between is project that explores the process of identity deactivation and reorientation
in the case of immigration and the extreme changes of the common lived- environments. In
which the practice of forming the new identity is not bound in space or in time it becomes an
ongoing practice understood both in its presence and its endlessness.

The project takes an example a study-experiment of the transformation of usage, perception,

new memory and the in-between shifted new identity formation of an immigrant. A comparison
study between the perception of public-spaces (Kennedy plaza-USA) analyzing the elements of
defining new emerged behaviors and identities (sounds-architectural elements…-scale) where
seeking for sense of belonging and familiarity becomes the core of the study.