Project Summary

Saba Innab’s City of Events: Mapping Project was prompted by her experience of Amman as an uncertain and seemingly unreal space. She has researched the development of the city—aerial photographs, especially from the formative years, literature, old newspapers, oral history and masterplans—to map paradigm shifts and timelines. Her work investigates particularly how the mental typographies of power, imposed in the interests of placing the city into a global context, have developed a tempo which is at odds with how people relate to the space domestically.

Presentation Proposal

The contemporary city of Amman, the capital of Jordan, is relatively young. It has been transformed in area and population over the last half century from a small town into a strategic centre in the region. This growth has always been subject to events imposed upon it by regional economic and political conditions; beginning with the political instability caused by the influx of enormous waves of refugees, passing through the economic outcomes of the oil boom in the Gulf during the ’70s, to the entering of the global markets of today. These events have formulated a contradictive reality: the temporal/permanent, the rural/inflated, the imagined/real—all of which are reflected through the morphology of the city, from its early formative years through to the time of abrupt explosion. Urgent needs called for quick and arbitrary solutions that left confusion in the city’s structure. This was followed by further efforts to redeem the resultant fallout. The city was thus shaped by these reciprocal actions, creating a multi-centred spatial reality, infinitely shifting. This project tries to analyse, map and scan discourse, change and structure in an attempt to reclaim the city.

Speaker

Saba Innab (b.1980, Kuwait) is an artist and architect whose work is concerned with urbanism and processes of space production and re-production. In 2004 Innab received a BA in Architecture at Jordan University of Science and Technology. In 2010 her architectural practice in Amman, Jordan, took her to the Nahr El-Bared camp in North Lebanon as part of the reconstruction team. Innab’s artistic practice, which comprises painting, drawing, mapping and installation, is very much influenced by her architectural work and is always based on a critical examination of cities and places. In the past 10 years she has been part of many regional and international exhibitions, art residencies and workshops.

November 2011

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