right of blood + left of the earth

al-majhoola min al-ard | biennale d’architecture d’orléans 2019
orléans, france 09/30/2019 - 10/31/2019

part of the collective show “This Land’s Unknown” which looks at the complex and layered representation of Arab spatial and architectural imaginaries born out of the desire to unsettle oppressive structures.

Citizenship is a designed threshold between the protection and denial of rights. Its reduction to the legal state between body and territory elides the complex, gendered, and racialized experience often held in the suspension of citizenship. In the way that the flag—an icon for both territory and identity—preserves the abstraction of the nation, one’s belonging to the nation is imagined as an “in" or “out" relation. The governing apparatus does not always recognize its subjects on the appropriate side of a vector projected onto sand. Belonging is a perceptual terrain, one that wears on the body in distinct ways.

In the varied textures of non/citizenship, women are especially vulnerable to exception and expulsion. In 14 of the 22 Arab League nation-states, the subjectification of the national citizen is bloody matter, dependent on the proper circulation of paternal blood at the expense of maternal rights. In Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Mauritania, Oman, Somalia, and Sudan, jus sanguinis (“right of blood” as opposed to “right of the soil,” jus soli) still excludes women from the reproduction of citizenship by endowing only patrilineal bloodlines with the power to confer it.

Building on the existing images of Lebanese women who gave blood in protest of gendered nationality laws in Beirut in 2011, our contribution to Al-Majhoola Min al-Ard—“she who has been vanished from the earth”—ruminates on the fleshy constitution of identity and the successive denials to incorporate the blood of women into jus sanguinis. Rather, we render women’s bodies within their diffuse tethers to land, state, family, and self as a material demonstration of belonging that is necessarily encountered in the street.

A flag to The Children of Jordanian Women, to those living under an evolving guardianship, to the Bidoun and others “without,” we aim at a representation that opens the pages of documents that do not pass, that turns a gaze on custody withheld, that grasps with manicured claws at an Arab body-politic that readily consumes the bodies of women. We assert the political subjectivity of the Arab woman against the limiting postures she must assume under both national exclusion and patriarchal control. These are their inextricable limbs.

research | design | exhibition

a project of f-architecture
partners: virginia black, gabrielle printz
curator: nora akawi