The founder of collective studio Counterspace Sumayya Vally and artist and curator Moad Musbahi use video, exhibitions, written work and architecture to tell the stories of hybrid African and Islamic territories seeking ways to express themselves, often focusing on peripheral or marginal places like mining landfills. Their practices converge on the need to intertwine art with social justice, archive, and ecology, preferring an alternate narrative for neglected, overlooked places and highlighting whatever is sacred and ritualistic in them as well as their performative, animistic dimension. Understood thus, architecture can be inclusive and aggregative and can amplify multiple identities, no longer working as a tool to separate and segregate.
