In Collaboration with Arch. Yara Sharif & Arch. Nasser Golzari

“Secrets of a Digital Garden: 50 Flowers…50 Villages” is a future imaginary scenario set up in rural Palestine in the form of a garden with 50 digital flowers representing 50 Palestinian villages.

The Digital Garden is a space of experimentation to reclaim some of the 420 villages existing in present day Palestine but also to mark, remember and commemorate the 420 Palestinian villages that had been erased to the ground in pre 1948 historic Palestine.

Nothing is conventional in this garden. 50 slices of earth containing ‘active’ flowers has been brought to Chicago to narrate the absurd dis-connectivity of Palestine territories and the Riwaq’s attempts to reclaim it through the 50 Villages Project.

In Occupied Palestine, architecture and landscape have become battlegrounds for multitude of colonial processes and historic annihilation. In this Digital Garden, architecture acquires profound political meanings that capture and narrate Palestine anew.

RIWAQ, as heritage practitioners, uses speculative and subversive projects and civic action as means to imagine possibilities for healing a wounded land and wounded people.