The Syrian Jawlān (Golan) constitutes two geographic regions, the first mountainous and the second a plateau, occupied by Israel since June 1967. Following the forced displacement of the majority of the Jawlāni population, the Israeli military forces destroyed over 250 villages and farms, and illegal settlements were built upon their ruins. In the five remaining villages, families who are physically separated by a militarized ceasefire line have for decades maintained their connection to their homeland, Syria. Since March 2011, Jawlānis have expressed their support for kin mobilizing around the Syrian Revolution. Using their voices, magnified and echoed along the border, they chanted: “You are The Voice; We Are Its Echo,” making audible the demands, dreams, and aspirations for freedom that defy enclosure (Ibraheem and Zakar, 2022).

Architects, designers, and researchers in this exhibition wish to echo Jawlāni land-based practices of anti-colonial resistance. The Jawlān is home to a transgenerational tradition of defending land and life, enacted through agricultural cooperatives, educational programs for youth, situated art practice and performance, organized marches and festivals. The exhibition invites visitors to develop an understanding of indigenous spatial practices of refusal—to open the discipline of architecture to references, imaginations, and tools rooted in the steadfast struggle of Jawlānis against Israeli settler-colonial rule.

The installation is imagined as a space of study made of three overlapping components: an immersive audio-visual installation transmits environments and conversations that narrate perspectives, past and present, of the movement for land protection; birdsong, an art installation explores the entanglements between birds and other bodies in the Syrian landscape; and a library of Mapping Memories of Resistance, an interface of maps, testimonies, documents, and curricula tells the story of resistance through the lens of social history. Together the works reveal the multi-temporality of resistance in the Jawlān and its reverberations across time.

This work was made possible thanks to support from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union.