Open Call
Open Call: DAAS in Cairo
In 2025, DAAS continues its journey in Cairo. This move grows naturally from the relations and conversations that began last year, particularly through Ezwa (عزوة) — networks of companionship and intellectual support formed among architects, artists, and thinkers who live between places, in the uncertainty of displacement and waiting. Cairo has become a place of proximity, where many of these practitioners now gather, think, and hold one another. DAAS in Cairo will take place at ARD, an independent cultural space in downtown Cairo, within the framework of DAAR’s 2025 residency there. This collaboration provides a grounded site for collective reflection and action — a place where research, conversation, and hospitality intersect in daily life.
To converse — al-muhādatha (المحادثة) — in Arabic means more than to speak. It comes from the root ḥ-d-th (حدث), which holds together the meanings of happening, narrating, and conversing. A conversation is therefore not merely an exchange of words but a happening — an event through which something unforeseen comes into being. The Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies (DAAS) program begins from this ground. It is not built on a fixed curriculum but on the fragile and fertile act of conversing. Knowledge here does not flow from teacher to student but emerges between participants — through encounters, shared practices, and the willingness to remain open to uncertainty.
DAAS – Decolonizing Architecture Art Studies, initiated by DAAR (Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti) in collaboration with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT), is an advanced research and educational programme open to artists, architects, curators, and cultural practitioners interested in situating and understanding their work within broader theoretical, historical, political, and social contexts. The programme is radically structured around participants’ own practices, offering a critical and convivial space for collective learning and reflection on questions rooted in context. It aims to create fertile ground for cultivating new forms of artistic research by bringing together practitioners who seek to belong to a community of thinkers open to shared reflection and collaborative inquiry.
In DAAS, vulnerability is not treated as weakness but as the very condition of learning. Participants are invited to bring their doubts, hesitations, and questions, and in doing so, to make space for others. It is in this openness that genuine connections take form, and that the distance between theory and practice, between the personal and the collective, can be crossed. The programme emerges from the fertile relationship and tensions between artistic research and pedagogy. Participants are asked to select a site as a source of knowledge and a foundation for their research inquiries and practical work. A site can be physical — a building, a street, a room — or immaterial — memory, voice, body, skin. What matters is that the site grounds reflection and allows practice to unfold. From the chosen site, participants are encouraged to reflect on concepts that emerge from it, grounding and testing their theories both within the site and in their own practice. In 2024, the first edition of DAAS took place in Sharjah, where the programme articulated its foundations in collective learning grounded in sites, concepts, and shared vulnerability. That year laid the groundwork for a community of thinkers and practitioners who understand knowledge as something that grows through relation rather than instruction.
Creating DAAS in Cairo is therefore an organic continuation of what has already taken root. It is a gesture of nearness — of remaining together through the challenges of distance and separation. It recognizes that knowledge does not only come from stability but also from the fragile ground of being together in times of rupture — from the courage to think collectively amid uncertainty. When colonialism fragments us, we come together as an act of resistance to fragmentation. Through learning how to know each other, to comprehend one another’s fears and doubts, we begin to rebuild what was divided. In DAAS, this coming together is not a metaphor but a practice — a way of facing separation with its opposite: the collective capacity to think, imagine, and act together. It is through this shared process that we reclaim the meaning of self-determination — not as an abstract political right, but as the lived possibility of shaping our common future through knowledge, mutual trust, and endurance.
The programme emerged from the fertile relationship and tensions between artistic research and pedagogy. Participants are asked to select a site as a source of knowledge and a foundation for their research inquiries and practical work. A site is understood as the anchor for reflection and action, and it can be a physical place like a building or your own living room, or it can be your own body or skin. What is important for the selection of the site is to feel grounded and knowledgeable. Examples for selecting a site can be found at the living room project.
After selecting the site, participants are encouraged to reflect on one or more concepts emerging from the chosen site to ground and test their theories within both the site and their own practice. The participants are invited to cultivate a constant oscillating movement between the tangible constraints of actual sites and to reflect on concepts that open up a critical understanding of the site. As an example, see how from the living room emerged the concept of “hospitality”.
This artistic research-based and pedagogical approach is exemplified in the book “Permanent Temporariness”, where seventeen site-specific research projects are activated by fourteen different concepts: Al Masha/Common, Borders, Camp, Confession, Decolonization, Exile, Heritage, Madafeh/Hospitality, Mujawaara/Neighboring, Participation, Profanation, Representation, Returns, Tawtin/Normalization.
This collective effort to conceptualize artistic practice-based research forms a “Collective Dictionary”, encompassing individual and shared terms that establish the theoretical framework for individual and collaborative actions. This collective dictionary fosters a community where peers share diverse sites and concepts, nurturing each other’s research endeavours.
The programme begins by sharing personal experiences, forming alliances, and fostering a communal space for mutual learning. Participants create a safe environment where they can share experiences, take risks, and be vulnerable without fear of exposure. This communal space is designed to allow for the expression of doubts and uncertainties, rather than presenting a series of polished projects and outcomes. They then respond to the program’s focus on connecting sites and concepts, allowing for critical reflection on their practice within social and political contexts. Therefore, the programme does not offer a preconceived knowledge but helps participants build their own individual and collective knowledge framework that gives meaning to actions and practices. At the end of the programme, participants will be equipped to contextualize their practice within a broader theoretical framework and articulate their practice in public.
The programme unfolds throughout the year through three in-person sessions — Winter (January 13–19), Spring (March 30–April 5), and Fall (October 27–November 2) — sustained in between by online one-to-one and group conversations that keep dialogue alive across the year.
Two of the sessions will take place in Cairo, while the third will be a public one-week gathering in Sharjah, hosted in collaboration with the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (SAT). The Sharjah gathering brings together participants from all DAAS cohorts, advisory board members, and friends of the programme.
During these sessions, participants will engage in conversations, site visits, collective practices, walks, and communal meals. Attendance at all three in-person sessions is mandatory, requiring participants to fully immerse themselves and suspend other activities for the duration of the week-long programme.
The Winter session in Cairo focuses on participants sharing their personal journeys in conversation, creating a space for vulnerability, mutual recognition, and the weaving together of individual trajectories into a collective process.
The Spring session in Cairo builds on this foundation, deepening the connections between participants’ journeys, sites, and concepts. This session remains centered on conversation — with peers, with invited guests, and with the city itself — as a way to ground reflection in lived experience rather than formal instruction.
The Fall session in Sharjah functions as a reunion for all DAAS participants across years, bringing together those in the current cohort with those who came before. It is structured as a public gathering, a week of collective conversations in which the vocabulary of DAAS is placed into dialogue with wider communities, extending the resonance of the programme.
Two online introductory sessions about the programme’s scope and structure will be held in November 2024, during which interested participants can ask questions and seek clarification. Optional individual online meetings will also be offered afterwards.
– Letter of Interest (1–3 pages)
– CV and/or Portfolio (maximum 10 pages, no more than 20MB)
Master’s degree in a relevant field of study or prior learning (equivalent professional experience). The programme encourages applicants who do not hold a formal master’s degree to apply by demonstrating equivalent professional experience. The programme aspires to develop an equalitarian and diverse research environment.
All applications should be submitted by email to [insert DAAS email address] with the subject heading DAAS in Cairo by midnight (GMT +2) on November 15, 2024.
Note: The programme does not provide visas and accommodation.
Contact
info@decolonizins.ps
Advisory board
Hoor Al Qasimi, Salah M. Hassan, Walter Mignolo, May Al-Dabbagh, Shahram Khosravi, Zoe Butt, Charles Esche.