// Island 861 / الجزيره 86

where exclusion and inclusion guards its imagined peripheries, the island that symbolizes the part of the city that is isolated from the sum... 

Boundaries, streets, buildings, open fields – the cities we inhabit are socio-political entities. The complexity of place reflects and gives shape to social, economic, historical material and political formations... Inland islands are one spatial reproduction of intangible boundaries, where exclusion and inclusion guards its imagined peripheries, the island that symbolizes the part of the city that is isolated from the sum...

The research based artistic project sheds the light on an Ammani neighbourhood, representing the symbolic cleansing of a marginalized "informal" settlement, Hay al Qaysieh Wadi Abdoun . 861 is the plot number given to the semi- island in the valley where the demolition has occurred to open up the way for a new high-rise district to take shape instead. The name ‘ island' is given to resembles the perseverance of modernist utopias and borrows the name from the fictional 'island' society in Greece by Sir Thomas More.  With concepts of modernity justifying 'destruction' with 'progression', or as ‘the price of progress’.  Erasing the informal, unofficial and the marginal to build more exclusive islands of excessive consumption, The “Consumerist Utopia”.

Illustrated handmade book with original prints; paper lithography, collagraphy, drypoint and monoprints printed on handmade Japanese kozo washi and awagami paper. 2020