about

DAAS in Sharjah is an advanced research educational programme led by DAAR - Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti in collaboration with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT). It welcomes artists, architects, curators, and cultural practitioners who seek to situate their work within a broader decolonial context. DAAS works without a fixed curriculum or conventional academic structure. It creates a shared ground where learning grows from encounters, conversations, and the lived experience of each participant considered a source of knowledge. Rather than aiming for institutional validation or polished outcomes, DAAS values hesitation, doubt, and unfinished thoughts as essential conditions for learning. Companionship is central to the programme.

• The advisory board, Hoor Al Qasimi, Salah M. Hassan, Walter Mignolo, May Al-Dabbagh, Shahram Khosravi, Zoe Butt, and Charles Esche, forms a constellation of thinkers whose presence accompanies the programme rather than guiding it from above. Participants from previous years Nihal Halimeh, Olfa Farhat, Zaynab Kriouech, Nadia Asfour, Mona El Mousfy, Ida Bencke, Shaden Almutlaq, Zarmeene Shah form another circle of companionship: their questions and sites continue to resonate, creating a living archive carried by people rather than institutions. Their participation keeps DAAS porous, accountable, and connected.

• Genealogy of DAAS

  DAAS grows from more than two decades of DAAR’s pedagogical experiments developed within conditions of exile, occupation, displacement, and difficult heritage. These include: Campus in Camps, a university in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Palestine that generated new vocabularies for life under permanent temporariness; the Concrete Tent, a hybrid structure that became a mobile classroom and later a site of collective mourning in Sharjah during the genocide in Gaza; the Tree School, a pedagogical platform that emerges whenever people gather under a tree to think on shared urgencies; the Difficult Heritage Summer School in Sicily, where fascist and colonial architectures became grounds for critical reflection and DAAS in Stockholm, a series of postmaster courses at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. These initiatives revealed that pedagogy is inseparable from the places and conditions in which it unfolds. Learning becomes meaningful only when grounded in lived experience.

  DAAS is a nomadic programme of learning, unlearning, and companionship through spatial practices, therefore each year, DAAS may shift locations, yet it returns to Sharjah for a collective gathering and a public program held with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial. This annual ritrovo - a moment of coming together again - offers time to reconnect and to continue the companionship at the core of DAAS.

  DAAS moves across locations in the region each year, shaped by the interests, questions, and sites brought by its participants. At the same time, it maintains its centre in Sharjah, which functions as an annual gathering point. Each year, DAAS returns to Sharjah for a public programme developed in collaboration with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, offering a moment for the growing DAAS community to meet, reconnect, and place its collective vocabulary into dialogue with a wider public.