Congratulations to Yasmine Katkhuda for receiving the Award of Excellence for her architectural thesis. Her advisor is professor Aki Ishida. Yasmine is from Amman, Jordan, and will be attending Columbia University in the City of New York City to obtain a MSc Architecture + Urban Design starting this June. Her thesis questions “domesticity at the juncture of architecture’s entanglements with settler colonialism in a diasporic world.” As she explains:  

“Spectators to their disappearance and destruction, three dislocated spaces of dwelling begin to re-emerge as apertures to subversive futures. Through collage complemented by narrative, multiple potentialities within this imagined junkspace unfold.

The process of making collage is dominated by dualities actively blurring, romanticizing, and questioning this discourse. Both mediative and reflective, the intentional or not, choice of material included or excluded through this medium, allows for a degree of subjectivity and ambiguity to surface regardless of graphic clarity. The space of dwelling and subsequent waste become the byproducts of collectivity, displaying collected artefacts (of memory and material) and curating possessions.

A series of seemingly disparate scenes begin to depict inherent dichotomies of home from the outside looking in-between and not yet inside, or from the inside looking beyond and never within. Existing in the space between memory and material, this thesis is a non-hierarchical, anti-formal experimentation on scenes of the ordinary as conceptual linkages between the imagined or possible, and the real or existing.”