Future Lives of Return (Sharjah Architecture Triennial 2019)

In 2012, the United Nations has projected that Gaza will be uninhabitable by the year 2020; this year is upon us, so what does this calculation mean?

Since the Great March of Return began on March 30, 2018, more than 8000 protestors have been shot by IDF snipers and sustained lower limb injuries, usually requiring multiple surgeries and in many cases, amputation. Using visual materials, experimental video art, modeling, and sound, architect Francesco Sebregondi and queer theorist Jasbir K. Puar project Gaza beyond the spectacular of humanitarian visual economies to show biopolitical practices of maiming and containment in banal, quotidian life. Their joint exhibition situates maiming in its multi-scalar temporal, generational, and spatial forms, complicating the exceptionalism of Gaza, and illuminating the elasticity and porosity of the blockade, its uneven and ever-changing titration of flows, designed not only to restrict goods and people but also to control the act and idea of movement itself. What escapes the blockade, however, is no less than multiple horizons of unyielding resistance and the future lives of return.