This workshop was organised by Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi and Maziyar Ghiabi, and was imagined as a cross-disciplinary dialogue about the relationship between architecture and internationalisms. This workshop was organised as two round-tables (each with 4 participants), with respondents to each round-table. The respondents were Daniela Ortiz dos Santos, Nikolay Erofeev, and Mercedes Volait.
The workshop was premised on the fact that fresh waves of research is affirming the multifaceted history of internationalism, but architecture is often taken for granted in these probes. Internationalists have not merely thought about and with buildings. Whether making decisions while sitting in a high-rise office building, an Avant-grade house, a lab or a conference hall in the US, Switzerland, China, or Brazil; and whether living on the ground in Alps or a refugee camp in Germany, undertaking a study trip in the Middle East and North Africa, they have also lived through buildings, encountering, and negotiating them in their everyday lives.
Rather than seeing the dynamic relation between architecture and internationalism as directional, the workshop discerned it as a process, framed by cultural, social and political scripts, capturing correlations and affinities as well as disconnections, dissatisfactions, and frustrations. In so doing, it aimed to offer new vantage points, explore alternative methodologies, and put forward future pathways.
I was very new to architectural history and archives at the time I attended this workshop, and I had no idea what my PhD was going to be! At this workshop, I was honoured to present alongside and learn from accomplished scholars like Dalal Mused Alsayer, Sonali Dhanpal, Maja Lorbek, Yasmina El Chami, Sneha Krishnan, Michał Murawski, Olga Touloumi, and of course Sara and Maziyar themselves.
For more about Tabbi’at, the network of scholars who kindly invited me to this workshop, visit https://healthscapes.co.uk/
poojasastry.com 