Photographer: Nuha Innab
“Will the Archive of the Future Include Our House?”
This is an ongoing research project that takes different forms, moving between the academic and the experimental. It aims to critically deconstruct the archive in response to its exclusionary and class-based tools, which only preserve one image of architecture produced through the accumulation of capital.
The project raises questions about the architectural archive, its tools, and our position as researchers and inhabitants. It calls for a critique of architectural instruments before critiquing archival ones, while tracing the political and economic forces that shape architecture’s image in the archive.
Nuha Innab is a Palestinian-Jordanian architect and urban researcher based in Amman. She holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture from the University of Jordan and a Master’s in Urbanism from the Universities of Stuttgart/Ain Shams. In 2018, she launched PLOT_436, a digital platform archiving modern architecture in Amman. That same year, she published Traces of Socialism, a book funded by AFAC, which used photography as a research tool. In 2019, she co-founded OPPa, a research collective for architecture and urban studies, with architect Saba Innab. She is currently working on a continuing research project (partially funded by AFAC 2023), which responds to the initial attempt at archiving and reimagines the “Archive of the Future” as a popular, non-institutional, and emancipatory archive.