Like You’ve Never Been There: Cinema and the Memory of Cities

On June 9-12, architects and filmmakers gathered at the King Ghazi Hotel in downtown Amman for a program of film screenings and conversations on cinema, cities, counter-narratives, and subjectivity. 

June 09, 2016

On June 9-12, architects and filmmakers gathered at the King Ghazi Hotel in downtown Amman for a program of film screenings and conversations on cinema, cities, counter-narratives, and subjectivity. 

This public program, organized by Studio-X Amman, explores how independent, low-budget, hybrid and personal cinema from the past two decades has produced representations and narratives that rewrite the histories and lived experiences of cities. In this selection of films curated by Rasha Salti, an independent curator and writer, the artists and filmmakers used the medium of film and the language of personal, hybrid and sometimes experimental cinema, to produce an image of that which is excluded from visibility. In blending institutional and private family archives, speaking in the first person or creating a stage for the voice of those not usually heard, foregrounding the fictional power of documentary and lacing it with fiction, from these films surface counter-narratives, sometimes inhibited and other times prohibited, sometimes neglected, ignored or simply forgotten. The film screenings were followed by conversations with filmmakers, architects and historians.

Participating speakers and discussants included:

Mona Assaad, independent filmmaker, Neighbors (Giran)

Sarah Francis, independent filmmaker, Birds of September (Tuyur Ayloul)

Omnia Khalil, participatory planner, urban anthropologist, and doctoral candidate in Anthropology, Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Arya Lalloo, independent filmmaker, Jeppe on a Friday

Khaled Malas, architect and doctoral candidate at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Mpho Matsipa, architect, researcher at the University of Witwatersrand, and Adjunct Assistant Professor and Curator of Studio-X Johannesburg at Columbia GSAPP

Elis Mendoza, architect, researcher, activist, and doctoral candidate in Architecture History and Theory at Princeton University

Rasha Salti, independent film and visual arts curator and writer