Sandi Hilal


Sandi Hilal is a Palestinian architect, writer, and researcher. Hilal was Head of the Infrastructure and Camp Improvement Program in the West Bank at UNRWA from 2008 to 2014.

Early life and education

Hilal was born in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem. She graduated with a Master's from the Sapienza University of Rome and a PhD from the University of Trieste in Transborder policies for daily life. She was then an assistant professor of Fine Art and Urban Studies at the Università Iuav di Venezia. She has since been a visiting professor at Lund University.

DAAR - Decolonising Architecture Art Research

Based in Palestine, DAAR is a collective working on art and architecture, comprising Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman. The collective offers new pedagogical practices for teaching, sharing and assembling. Through processes of talking, treasuring and gathering with memories, they enact re-constructions of living spaces, focusing on diasporic existences and refugee camps. Their work extends thinking on intangible heritage: they widen possibilities for re-establishing presence, by exploring provisionality and permanence in the built environment. They re-imagine, re-design and re-purpose Israeli architecture as de-colonial practice: “speculating about the seemingly impossible, the actual transformation of the structures of domination.”
The Campus in Camps project created a learning and project space in refugee camps in collaboration with Al Quds University and hosted by the Phoenix Center in Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem and with the support of the Popular Committees of Southern West Bank refugee camps.
Shu'fat School is a girls school built in Shu'fat refugee camp on the outskirts of Jerusalem. created with the goal of making a collaborative space for learning that encourages participants as active agents in their education.

Architectural Interventions

Concrete Tent, Dheisheh and is a project that explores the tent's historic role as a mobile or temporary housing structure. It works to make this solid, using concrete to fix the form of the tent as a more permanent structure. It was exhibited at the Sharjah Architecture Biennial in 2023.

Publications

Exhibitions and institutional collaborations

Awards