This event will be conducted in-person in Room 315F and through Zoom. 

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here.
For Zoom attendance, please register here.

In his poem Phosphorus, Bread, Coffee (2009), published in As-Safir, Hilal Chouman writes: “I discovered that my skin is not white. I became certain of this when I saw the white spots [of phosphorus] trickle through my skin... The fire reached my bones. Whiteness consumed me.” This lecture confronts the joint onslaught of military and white supremacy on southern Lebanon as a stark manifestation of the global expansionist project aimed at dominating the contemporary night. Specifically, it reveals how farmers and shepherds, recognizing the mounting conflict between light and life in their homeland, aimed their spades at their oppressors and wielded darkness into their arsenal of life-making tools. For even their strongest walls had been destroyed, and with them the delusion that architecture, in its traditional sites and forms, could protect from the enemy’s weapons, systems, and environments. By examining how they learned to carve liberated spaces from their fertile nights, this lecture aims to foreground a new practice of darkness, a new alliance with the night, one that molts architecture’s colonial imprints by confronting the discipline from its shadows. Moving between research, built, and decimated projects, it aims to highlight a history, especially an environmental history, that falls outside documented episodes of territorial expansion. To read it at night is to stretch these colonial outbursts so thinly, so delicately that they allow for glimpses into the labor of those committed to the pursuit of life in the brightness of imperialism.

The lecture will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Ralph Karam.

Mohamad Nahleh is Assistant Professor of architecture at The Ohio State University. His research and practice engage the fields of environmental history, cultural anthropology, and postcolonial literature in expanding the role and imagination of the night in architecture. Recognizing the night as a space rather than a time, Nahleh’s work unsettles the current interchangeability between ‘night design’ and ‘light design’ by charging architecture with the urgency to overcome the Western metaphors of light and darkness. His forthcoming book, Design After Dark, studies the transformation of the night in the Middle East following the expansion of Ottoman, French, and Zionist colonial projects. It reveals, in particular, how the people of Jabal ‘Amil in Lebanon collaborated with the night to design their liberation. His writing has been published in several journals and magazines, including Places, Thresholds, the Journal of Architectural Education, and The Funambulist. Nahleh is also a practicing architect in Lebanon.  

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.