Refugee camps should not exist at all: they represent a crime and a political failure. For more than a century, the camps have undermined the Western notion of the city as a civic space where the rights of citizens are written down and recognized. Camps are built with the intention of destroying them. They are not intended to have a history and a future; they are meant to be forgotten. The history of refugee camps is constantly erased, and rejected by states, humanitarian organizations, international agencies, and even refugee communities themselves, fearing that any recognition of the present undermines their right to return. The only recognized history in refugee communities is one of violence, suffering and humiliation. How then are we to understand the life and culture that people build in the camps, despite suffering and marginalization?

Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti have developed an artistic practice based on research projects that is both theoretically ambitious and practically engaged in the struggle for justice and equality. They founded Campus in Camps, an experimental educational program implemented in the Dheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, with the aim of transcending conventional educational structures by creating spaces for the production of critical and grounded knowledge. In 2007, together with Eyal Weizman, they founded DAAR / Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency in Beit Sahour, Palestine, with the aim of combining an architecture studio and an art residency that would bring together architects, artists, activists, urban planners, filmmakers and curators on projects with the theme of politics and architecture.

The lecture is part of the project They were, those people, a kind of solution supported by Creative Europe program of European Union.