Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi

Drawing the Dadaab Refugee Camps: A Critical Archive

In the development of the book Architecture of Migration, an architectural history of the Dadaab refugee camps on the border of Somalia, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi engaged in a critical practice of knowledge production and archiving, working with Nairobi-based artists and architects to draw Dadaab in its myriad forms. This talk examines the works these artists produced, using Dadaab as a referent. (Works by Deqa Abshir, AbdulFatah Adam, Cave Bureau, and Elsa MH Mäki).

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the author of Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press), on the spatial politics, visual rhetoric, and ecologies of the UNHCR-administered camps at Dadaab, Kenya. Siddiqi is the co-editor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence.

Organized as part of the Preservation Lecture Series, an initiative of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia GSAPP.

Painting by Deqa Abshir, titled Fragmented II.