FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ Meriem, it’s a pleasure to talk with you, as one of the former LINA fellows invited to share your perspectives at the organisation’s third conference in Sarajevo. Both hosts, Dunja (Krvavac) and Irhana (Šehović), expressed their interest in your perspective on the relationship between the sacred and the land. I wonder if we could relate that to the context of Sarajevo — itself an intricate, resourceful and hopeful place.

MERIEM CHABANI Of course. As you mentioned, I was one of the fellows for the LINA platform, with the research topic of ‘sacred grounds’. When I applied, I was in the early stages of that ongoing research. I then went on to apply to the Wheelwright Prize, eventually ranking as a finalist for the award this year. This is just to add context to the broader research before delving into it; I'm happy to see that it is connecting with people, in ways that I did not necessarily expect.

What I'm interested in with the sacred, as a topic, is the idea of value and the hierarchy of value in the built environment. As practising architects, the main metric of value we are confronted with is money. So we have witnessed the financialisation of construction, which is where neoliberalism has taken us. This begs the question: are there any counter-values that we can use to design around the climate crisis, presenting a challenge between financialisation and the need for sustainable practices in the built environment?

In order to see how we could connect these things, I read this book by the philosopher and historian, Mohamed Amer Meziane. His book, States of the Earth, is a rereading of history, looking at the secularisation of Europe as the means by which capitalist extractivism became prevalent. He draws from the moment where the land becomes dead or inert; that is, when there is no longer a prevalent belief that the land might be inhabited by any forms of invisible life: no counter-powers, no fairies, magic, dragons or gods that might punish you or push back. It follows, therefore, that you are free to dig deep, delve in and extract what you need and to pull the maximum value from that land. What's really interesting is that we have examples in the built environment — instances of contrast between profane and sacred or protected spaces.

For example, the artist and researcher Imani Jacqueline Brown, working with Forensic Architecture, did some work on the Mississippi Valley in the United States to identify these sacred groves — places where you still have trees in the middle of plantations — or what used to be plantations, and which have now been converted into brownfield, agricultural land, or oil fields. Within these expanses, you can find sudden clumps of trees — which seem a bit weird as they're in the middle of former plantation fields. The reason for these isolated groves is that they were former burial grounds for enslaved people; they were buried there. It is the taboo of death and the sacredness of the burial grounds that have allowed these places and these trees to remain. So interestingly, you have this contrast between productive and non-productive landscape, maintained thanks to this sanctity. In construction, other examples are available for us to examine.

What I’ve tried to establish are four principles that could help us to both read and identify ‘sacred’ places — not confined and indeed beyond obvious places of worship; of course a church, a mosque, a synagogue or a temple would have a sacred connotation. What's really interesting is to imagine how many varied factors in cities might benefit from the power of sanctity and the value latent in such a quality.

One of the elements that we can use to read or identify sacredness is reciprocity. So reciprocity, in contrast to extraction, describes a mode of gathering or taking of materials from land in a non-destructive manner. We have many examples in indigenous North American lands, where we see, for instance, timber that has been taken from trees without destroying them completely. Trees may bear scars from the removal of their material, but they have also been maintained and cared for; they remained living and kept growing, producing more timber. This tangible exchange is what would allow populations today to reclaim ownership of these lands. There are actual and ongoing legal battles for land rights that are being fought on the basis of such traces of non-extractive coexistence, and the way resources have been deployed in reciprocity, as construction material in order to dwell on a particular site. This is just one example — but this notion of reciprocity, for me, appeals on the level of a ‘first principle’ to establish as spatial practitioners, both as a way to identify and to implement our practices.

The second principle is maintenance — and we've all spoken about care; currently this is a notion that is very much present in the architectural discourse. That's a great thing; the idea is to truly engage with care and maintenance. As we know, there are reasons why people take care of a place, and there are triggers to create that. There are numerous examples where people maintain, protect, and sustain a building’s life through dedicated care, driven by the belief in its sacredness. This ongoing maintenance not only preserves the physical structure but also extends its life, allowing it to remain meaningful for generations. Take the Djenne mosque in Mali, a hundred-year-old earth building. The reason it still exists is because people take care of it annually; there is a major community event around the replastering of that building each and every year. The third principle is rituals; again, we have a very wide array of acts which could be described as rituals, but here we mean to identify and understand the occurrence of regular, repetitive human habits around a place and to look at how we can nurture such practices. By tapping into existing rituals and identifying places that already hold meaning, we can incorporate this understanding into the way we build.

KOOZ Thank you so much for that fulsome answer. What were your perceptions when you went to Sarajevo? I’m thinking about this kind of coexistence of cultures, which really seems to hold a special value here. There are parts outside of the city where you can see the financialisation of the real estate market, but somehow the old city seems to be holding back from that.

MC When I went to Sarajevo, I presented a mosque project that we're doing in Paris. I was really talking about the battle for the sacred to exist in a secular society, especially with a lot of pushback in the particularly Islamophobic context of France. What was interesting was the conversations that I was having with people there. I was surprised at how well people connected with the topic. I assumed that Sarajevo would be facing similar issues, but what resonated universally was the idea of a city confronted with violence and the destruction of its territories. It was about connecting to the sense of places once thought secure and protected, now destroyed, violated, and laid to waste.

I think that we collectively hold on to this idea that there might be places that are off-limits. As humans, we almost need to strive for that, that we might collectively protect or make sure that places are under total protection against whatever evils and destructions might be going on in the world. Collectively today — especially with what is going on in Palestine, in Lebanon right now — I think we all feel it on a very cellular level. Is there a way? Is there a place that is safe? Can buildings protect us? I feel like that's where the conversation was taking us in Sarajevo — how can we make sure that this doesn't happen again tomorrow? How can we reinstate the shattered centuries of protection collectively — obviously, as spatial practitioners but more broadly as communities.

KOOZ Indeed it is a conversation that touches us on a very cellular level. It’s as if the idea of safety, of a space that may be protected, really doesn't exist anymore. It's as if that has been lost; we have lost the ability to recognize something as a safe space, and to respect that. I'd never realised, before this war, that spaces like hospitals, schools — once guarded by a kind of a code by which those would not be touched — could be attacked as they are right now, almost as the front line. Can we ‘return’ — if that was ever possible — to an idea of ‘sacred’ spaces, in terms of safe-guarded spaces?

MC I think that we have witnessed a reversal where the safest places are actually the first targets in the multiple wars and unfolding violence that we're living through. When I was a child, I was always fascinated by the Disney retelling of the Hunchback of Notre Dame — do you remember it? I was always fascinated by the moment when Esmeralda reaches the church at Notre Dame; and finds safety, because there is this rule of sanctuary. The police can't get you, the army cannot enter, the bad guys can’t cross the gates. I was fascinated by how a building could hold this power, yet we have since witnessed the destruction of that notion, in our global psyche. I think that's what I'm interested in reconnecting with and having conversations where we fully contend with this loss — because it didn't just ‘happen’ out of the blue. It occurs within a much broader continuum, and I believe the value of sanctuary in space has been eroded over time. Going back to what Mohamed Amer Meziane mentioned, we are embedded in a historical, philosophical and ideological movement that has brought us to this point — so I think that it is on the field of ideology, philosophy and theory that we need to fight back.

KOOZ How does a platform like LINA enable you to nurture these conversations and forward your practice?

MC Well, I think there are several great aspects to the platform. While it has a clear European focus, the lack of a single partnership with institutions has actually fostered stronger interaction between communities, creating a more dynamic and interconnected environment. There are conversations which take place in vacuums and in echo chambers, each in our own countries, each in our own little bubbles, but this opportunity of coming together, that was, I would say, the strongest driver. We were not necessarily set on collaborating with any specific institution; each its own agenda, and you need to find the right fit. Conversations need to happen to see whether collaboration is even possible. Within LINA, I remember that every single partnership started with sharing what we're working on right now. It was about laying out what we were interested in, and looking at the places of friction. It was really fun to talk openly, without having to craft something around a particular or prescribed topic. It was much more open ended, and that really left the space for unexpected collaborations to happen.

KOOZ With New South, you talk about bringing the margins to the centre. This idea of margins or periphery somehow reinforces the notion of centre as well as the periphery itself; I really felt that Dunja and Irhana somehow mocking this in their lecture "Architectures of the Periphery". What do the notions of margin and centre hold for you?

MC In a word, it's about racism. Let me explain how. We all know that races aren't real. They don’t exist. There is one human race — but socially, we know that ‘races’ do very much exist, and that there are constructions that build otherness out of cultural and physical differences. For example, I know that when I engage in a conversation or meet someone, my positionality — both in terms of gender and of race in the social sense — is going to come into play, whether I like it or not. Using the words of bell hooks — because that's really from her book, from the margin to the center — the idea is to recognise the existence of a mindset that does relegate certain knowledges, certain lands, certain bodies to the margin, and that there is a centre, a prevalent male, white, Western European centre to the world that we're all navigating. Architecture exists within this dynamic. At New South, with every project and piece of research, we aim to flip the coin, to challenge and shift the dynamic. This approach is deeply informed by our diasporic practice. As an Algerian who doesn’t live in Algeria, I find myself navigating that in-between space — existing at the margins of multiple centres, constantly in motion and embracing the fluidity of this position. It’s also about resisting this idea of centrality, and the allure of attempting to belong to that centrality. This is where the perversity of the whole system lies: it pushes us to aspire, to inhabit, and to be fully accepted within the centre, urging us to belong to a space that often marginalises us.

KOOZ As a practising architect, storyteller and writer, I do believe in the generosity of architecture, and I believe that we need to talk about this in terms of the work that architecture can do, to be more inclusive, more generous in its practice. What is your position in relation to the violence of architecture, versus its capacity for generosity?

MC I'm completely on the same page with you. If we take a certain logic to its conclusion, human existence — by its very nature — can be seen as a form of violence upon the environment. Our survival depends on altering our surroundings — building shelter, gathering food, transforming the land. In this sense, acting upon the environment is unavoidable, and violence, in a broader sense, could be understood as simply ‘action’. In a sense, this holds a parallel with motherhood, as well. For a child, a mother's womb is both protection, and constraint or container for the first nine months of its life. That said, I fully believe in the potential of architecture and space to nurture, to move beyond just inflicting violence. Architecture is a tool that can either support or harm, depending on the parameters we set. It's an expression — technical, physical, artistic — but if we work with the wrong parameters, that's when we risk creating something inherently harmful.

This is like building a sentence. We need the right words; we need the right vocabulary. Obviously, there are the practical considerations like temperature, wind, climate, humidity, and so on — but beyond that, architecture has the potential to capture light, reflect orientations that hold meaning, and unify various parameters that embody values. By syncretizing these elements into one discipline, one form of action, we reveal architecture’s true strength and power: its capacity for generosity and the deeper significance it can embody.

KOOZ This was fantastic. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for taking this time.

MC Thank you so much.

Bio

Meriem Chabani is the Algerian born, Paris based founder and Principal of NEW SOUTH, an award-winning architecture, urban planning and anthropology practice prioritising spaces for vulnerable bodies in contested territories. Her work on complex sites includes the Taungdwingyi cultural centre in Myanmar, the Globe Aroma refugee art centre in Brussels, and the upcoming Mosque Zero in Paris. She currently teaches at ENSA Paris Malaquais (FR) and the Royal College of Arts (UK). In 2020 Meriem won the Europe 40 under 40 award. She is a recipient of the Graham Foundation Grant, and was named one of the leading young female architects in France by AMC in 2023.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.