Studio grant holder in Stockholm 1 April – 30 September 2019

Sandi Hilal, born 1973 in Beit Sahour, Palestine; lives and works in Stockholm.

I’m an architect, artist and educator. I’m currently developing an ongoing art and research project around the concept of hospitality, particularly the Right to be a Host, including the project Al-Madhafah: the hospitality room, under the aegis of Public Art Agency Sweden that enabled the creation of the first Madhafah in the city of Boden, located 80 km south of the Arctic Circle. The Madhafah will travel to other places such as the Fawwar Refugee camp in Palestine, and will be presented at ArkDes, Stockholm; NYU Art Gallery, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands and Qalandiya International, Palestine.

Photo: Sandi Hilal

Al-Madhafah, in Arabic, is the living room dedicated to hospitality. It has the potential to subvert the role of guest and host and give a different socio-political meaning to the act of hospitality. It seeks to mobilise the condition of permanent temporariness as an architectural and political concept able to challenge the binaries of inclusion and exclusion, public and private, guest and host. It activates the rights of temporary people to host and not to eternally be a guest, the right to claim life in the new destination but without feeling obliged to revoke the desire to belong to the life back home. During the Residency I would like to continue to further develop the Madhafah project.