Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Sandy Hilal is a Palestinian architect and writer born in 1973. She headed the West Bank Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Programme for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East from 2008 to 2014.
her life
Sandy Hilal was born in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem , Palestine, in 1973. She received her master's degree from Sapienza University of Rome , and then her doctorate from the University of Trieste .
Her career
Sandy Hilal worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Fine Arts and Urban Studies at the University of Venice , and then joined as a visiting professor at Lund University .
Dar Foundation
Sandy Hilal collaborated with Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman to found the DAAR Foundation, a collective art and architecture workshop based in Palestine that offers new pedagogies of teaching, participation and assembly, and reconstructs Palestinian living spaces through the processes of speaking, memorizing and collecting, with a focus on Palestinians in the diaspora and refugee camps . The workshop’s work also includes expanding the scope of thinking about the intangible heritage of Palestinians, which helps to envision and redesign Palestinian architectural styles as an anti-colonial practice. The workshop resulted in the Campus in the Camps project from 2012-2016, which served as a learning space alongside projects established in refugee camps in collaboration with Al-Quds University and hosted by the Phoenix Center in Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, with the support of the Al-Quds Foundation , and some of the popular committees of refugee camps in the southern West Bank. In 2014, the workshop established the Shuafat School Project, a girls’ school built in the Shuafat refugee camp on the outskirts of Jerusalem . The main goal of the project was to create a collaborative learning space that encouraged participants to act as active agents in their own education.
Between 2015 and 2018, the Foundation participated in the concrete tent project for the Deheishe camp, which revolved around the historical role of the tent as a mobile or temporary housing structure. The tent was made solid, using concrete to stabilize the shape of the tent as a more permanent structure. The project was presented at the Sharjah Architecture Biennial in 2023.
Her writings
Sandy Hilal has published a number of books, publications and research papers in the fields of architecture and arts. The following table shows her most important publications:
stateless nation
Public Memory and Public Art – Reflections on Monuments and Memorial Art Today
Refugee heritage
Temporary Permanent
Architecture after the revolution
Source
Achievements and Awards
- Years in active
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