How does architecture empty rather than fill?
Ola Hassanain’s practice explores how architecture positions building as an ecological ‘emptying’ of territories, and an infrastructure for continuous cycles of catastrophe, such as forced migration. Drawing on her research into the politics of space, Ola composed The line that follows as a constellation of manipulated perspective drawings derived from routes taken in Khartoum, abstracted forms, text, diagrams, Sufi and Zar practices – all placeholders for an unemptied space.
11 min.
Ola Hassanain is an architect, artist and researcher working between Sudan and The Netherlands. She trained her focus on the subtle politics of space—namely, how built spaces react to and reinforce violence from state entities, which in turn, builds an environment that regulates the lives of those who inhabit it. Her most recent work explores the idea of “space as discourse,” an expanded notion of space that encompasses political and environmental questions. Her work tries to develop a spatial vocabulary that follows how ruptures presented by political events make it possible to aspire to new kinds of ecologies. Ola’s development of critical spatial practice is partly informed by her post-academic training; an ongoing Rijksakademie residency, a BAK fellowship 2017-2018 and teaching at the HKU University of the Arts in Utrecht and at the Sandberg Institute among others.
