Introduction

The reminder of bombardment and war loom in the reflections of the ruins through the west screen in the nave, as well as in the contemplative space of the ruins themselves. As Gaza was being repeatedly bombed, with continuous displacements and losses, demonstrations would regularly rally on the steps of the cathedral, in the threshold space between the ruins and the new architecture. I spent many days sitting at a desk in the archives under the nave of Coventry cathedral, starring at several shelves of uncatalogued materials consisting of books, newsletters, booklets, slides and audio cassettes.

A yellow Kodak square, with the label Al Shafar stuck on the side caught my vision. Having starred at it on several occasions, not knowing if I should be looking at it, one day I picked it up and opened it to find a carousel of 80 slides with a typed slide description; a script for a talk to accompany the slides. The materialisation of House of Hope, as formulated by Elias Jabbour in 1978, is partly captured in the slides, as well as in the correspondence with the cathedral, along with publications by Jabbour, who was connected to the Cross of Nails from Coventry Cathedral. Jabbour was a Palestinian Christian and Arab-Israeli citizen, he initiated the conceptual House as an international peace centre in the Palestinian Arab town of Shefa-Amr in the Galilee region, which has been part of the Israeli state since 1948.

I invited two architects to engage with the slides, Mahsa Alami Fariman and Ahmadreza Hakiminejad, both of whom had curated an incredibly moving event in Coventry cathedral, with music, whistling, talks and singing, on 'Woman, Life, Freedom: The Sounds of A Revolution', on 20 May 2023. Grappling with what archives carry, as well as body as archive, they instantly connected the carousel of slides and the accompanying text, with the paintings of their architect artist friend Heba Sabboubeh from Palestine, who lives in Coventry. Approaching hope and despair together, Heba, Reza and Mahsa produced an art-book [hosted on this website], in response to the notion of House of Hope. This podcast is a discussion of their process of engagement.

Middle Eastern inter-generational trauma across time and space layers their responses to the box of slides, providing an alternative archive and alternative index to the archive. The podcast conversation picks up on how the House of Hope is one of Despair, laden with years of spatial and embodied inter-generational trauma in Palestine. Listening to the body as an archive, Heba connects the slides to vivid memories of plants, home, childhood, architecture, and the sound of military boots and stones. Heba discusses the buildings in her paintings, the figures of children and elder women who wait for returnees, whilst living in uncertainty. Grandmothers, children, paradise and destruction come together to re-situate dreams amongst the violence. The podcast discussion moves from the archives to the glass circular structure of the Chapel of Industry, where Heba reads a letter she wrote to her son from living under immediate curfew whilst pregnant.

Hope manifests in multiple configurations, in this site-specific conversation, the cathedral is envisioned as a radical space for political imagination; a utopian house of possibility and becoming; “a compass of mourning” as stated by Judith Butler, one that calls up the unachievable, requiring dreamers, poets and organisers. Architecture as a different and diverse space sits as a potential space for unlearning of orthodoxies in the special place of the cathedral.

Biographies

Dr Mahsa Alami Fariman is an urban researcher and educator with a background in architecture and urban studies. She is currently Lecturer in Just Urbanism, Societal Diversity and Citizenship at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL. Prior to this, she taught urban geography at Coventry University and lectured in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Trained as an architect, Mahsa previously worked in architectural practices in Iran. She holds a PhD in Urban Sociology from Goldsmiths, an MA in Architecture (Cultural Identity and Globalisation) from the University of Westminster, and a BA in Architecture from Islamic Azad University in Iran. Her research focuses on the politics of space, open city, feminist urbanism, and the production of everyday urban life in the Middle East. Drawing on her lived experience and academic engagement with the region, she is committed to expanding urban discourse through ideas and perspectives grounded beyond Western contexts.

Dr Ahmadreza Hakiminejad is a trained architect, researcher, and experimental photographer, currently Lecturer in Architecture at the Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University. A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and member of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, he studied architecture, urban design, and spatial planning in Iran and the UK, and previously worked in architectural practices in the Middle East. He also taught at Coventry University, and the University of West London, and has been invited as a guest critic and lecturer at the University of Westminster and The Bartlett, UCL. He is an international editor on the Editorial Team of City, Architecture and Society Journal, a participant of the ArtSpaceCity Research Group at Coventry University and sits on the jury for the Tamayouz Excellence Award. He acts as a peer reviewer for: The Journal of Architecture, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Architectural Education, and Review of Regional Research. His research focuses on critical urban theory, the sociopolitics of placemaking, architecture and cities, architectural history and theory, and urban sociology. His forthcoming co-edited book, City, Public Space, and Body: The Embodied Experience of Urban Life, will be published by Routledge in late 2025.

Dr Heba Nimer Sabboubeh is a Palestinian architect, visual artist, and academic based at Aston University, UK. Her passion for art began in early childhood, eventually guiding her toward architecture; a field where she merges technical skill with artistic expression. Her artwork, known for bold lines and vibrant colours, conveys emotional depth, introspection, and quiet resistance. She has exhibited widely, including with the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, and held her first solo show in 2014 at Dar Zahran Heritage Building in Ramallah. Heba’s art explores themes of humanitarian struggle and social adversity, offering a poignant visual commentary on life, particularly within the Arab world. Alongside her artistic practice, she has contributed significantly to architectural projects in Palestine, working with organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, and the Ministry of Education. As a senior architect at Palestine Technical University, she led the design of key facilities, including the university’s sports complex. Her academic journey brought her to the UK, where she completed a MA and PhD in architecture. Prior to joining Aston, she taught architecture and the built environment at Bolton University and at Coventry University. Alongside her academic commitments, painting remains central to Heba’s life; a medium through which she continues to express resilience, resistance, and truth.

Podcast

Experimental index

Trauma, Body and Home: An Affective Response to the 'House of Hope' was created by Mahsa Alami Fariman (University College London), Ahmadreza Hakiminejad (Leeds Beckett University), and Heba N. Sabboubeh (Aston University) as an outcome of their research on the British Academy Innovation Fellowship project Multicultural Experiments in the Civic Life of a Cathedral, led by Professor Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths, University of London), and supported by the British Academy Innovation Fellowship Scheme and Coventry Cathedral.

Transcript

NIRMAL PUWAR: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the podcast Hear Here. Today we have three really special guests. They're all architects, and they are going to reflect on different approaches to some slides I actually came across in the archives. We're sitting in the archives underneath the nave of the Cathedral.

A yellow square box stared at me as Gaza was being bombed again and again. This box had a label saying “slide/commentary” with a big label saying “Shefa-Amr”. I looked through these slides, and I couldn't really make sense of them, but there was text that accompanied the slides. So, clearly there were talks that were delivered, a script that was delivered with these slides.

I thought about what to do with this for many months, and then I shared these with Mahsa, Reza, and Heba. They are all architects, and they all work with creative methods in different ways. Heba Sabboubeh has really been very involved in our project that we're going to share today. So, our discussion today is rather like a seminar workshop because we've been having this dialogue in different ways over time.

Heba is a Palestinian lecturer in architecture working at Aston University. She's also an artist activist. Reza works with architecture, politics, cities, and photography. Mahsa is based at UCL. I've been familiar with her work for many years. She was a doctoral student at Goldsmiths some years ago when she worked on gender, space, and she's developed that with sound and activism.

Each of them will also give you further introductions and their own reflections on their practice. So, first we'll start with a question that I've been thinking about in terms of how the three of you, together, actually collaboratively approached these slides that I found in the archives on the House of Hope.

MAHSA ALAMI FARIMAN: Thank you so much, Nirmal, for having us and for this nice introduction. You're right, it's been a very long journey. We are working together; we know each other, and with the project we actually developed here, now we are sitting in the archives in the basement of the cathedral. I never imagined myself in the basement, sitting and talking about a very special project, as you mentioned, which you found in the archives. I think we are privileged enough to have another go and have another read of this archive on this date today, in 2025.

So, I am a lecturer in DPU (Development Planning Units). I am lecturing on just urbanism, diversity, and citizenship, and I think what I do is linked to why we are here. So, when we got our hands on this archive, I think, it was quite important for me to look at these slides through the lens of carrying or what they carry. I think you discussed this in your work, Nirmal, on the paper entitled ‘Carrying as methods, bodies as archive’, a couple of years ago. So, I think sitting here looking at these slides, one by one, and then going through the scripts and reading them, I think it was very much about what the House of Hope project itself collected at the time and holds and stores within itself.

And they had a specific perception of peace between Israel and Palestine back in the 1980s when the project was happening, and again, we are still talking about the same cause. We are coming together and talking about the same conflict, which is basically more advanced and more violent today. Sometimes we are talking together with Heba and questioning whether it was a naive perception they had, how we can have another go, another reading of this archive today.

I think one of the important things that this piece of work was carrying was its symbolism. It was a symbolic violence for me. I think you can see in some of the slides or some of the pictures, for instance, when there is an army vehicle, or you can feel what is happening afterwards, or with this script and statements that are contained within them in this document. So that symbolic violence was important, and at the same time, we were thinking about looking at the body as archive. Again, going back to what you were talking about—body as archive—was also important. We’re three Middle Easterns sitting here, Reza and I from Iran, Heba from Palestine, and we acknowledged how we as Middle Easterns carry traumas. They stay with us, always stay with us intergenerationally. It doesn't matter how old you become, across different times and spaces, we carry these traumas.

In this case, it was very much about how we are listening to the body as an archive rather than thinking of this slide tray only as a physical item. So, we invited Heba to connect that idea of body as an archive to her memory and the idea of trauma of violence, and the memories we were talking about, the things she was going through.

So, we invited Heba as a Palestinian, academic, and artist to respond to the House of Hope Project, and we had this conversation with Heba that it shouldn't be something through the fragments of memory, because every archive is a material, and they are representing fragments of memory. But in this case, it's a vivid memory; it's not fragmented, it's always lived in. We were talking about how to bring that vivid memory of a home in Palestine, of hope in Palestine, or despair in Palestine. And of course, we wanted to kind of deal with different layers of trauma that she carried. Again, going back to that idea of the female body as an archive of memory was quite important for us. She reflected on home and body back in Palestine, and she did it through painting and storytelling. And for that matter, we called our work Trauma, Body and Home: An Affective Response to the House of Hope.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Thank you for sharing that, and it's really important that we have these reflections on this slide collection connected to this vision of a House of Hope, and hope is, as you say, on the other side of despair. And the coin is really falling right now in the contemporary moment, away from hope, so much so. Reza, you've also had the slides digitised. Do you want to come in at this point?

[00:09:15]

REZA HAKIMINEJAD: Yes, thank you, Nirmal. When we looked at the slide tray and we went through the scripts that were there, we also found a lot of correspondence between Coventry cathedral, interestingly, and the House of Hope initiative and peoples in Palestine, in Shefa-Amr, in what is called in the paper, in Israel but it was part of the state of Israel since 1948.

When we went through the slides and the scripts, we found the tone of the scripts was quite interesting. There were 80 slides, and it was very much religiously charged. It was about this gathering that happened at the Coventry cathedral, so they invited the delegates from Israel, from the House of Hope, in the late 1980s. But when I went through the correspondence, I realised that they had a long relationship since 1978 actually. So, almost a decade before that, they started to build up a relationship with Coventry cathedral.

The House of Hope was officially established in 1978, and the person behind it was someone called Elias Jabbour, who was himself an Arab Palestinian and also a Christian. It's important to mention Christian because he recognises himself as Arab Christian and also Arab Israeli, who lives in Shefa-Amr, which is part of the Jallili or I think the other pronunciation probably is Jaleeli, a region of the now northern Israel.

He established the House of Hope in his living room because he doesn't have many resources, but he tries to go beyond the borders of Palestine and Israel and then advocates for peace. So officially, they claimed in the writings, in the newsletters, when you look into the archive, that they are the first Arab initiative peace centre in Israel.

This is interesting. When you go through the slides that were presented at Coventry cathedral, I'm not 100% sure if Elias Jabbour was present at that particular event, but he was in Coventry many times. He had a relationship, and he had correspondence with the cathedral. And one reason is that the Cross of Nails, which was the committee or commission of the Cross of Nails, which was basically based on Coventry cathedral, had Elias Jabbour as their chapter in Shefa-‘Amr. So, he was one of the people who were kind of advocating for the Cross of Nails Commission, which was for reconciliation and peacemaking.

So, Christianity was at the heart of it, but he was trying to bring Muslims, Christians, the Rus, another branch of Islam that was a population of Shefa-‘Amr, and also Jewish people.

I'm sure that is his thinking behind these slides. There are very short descriptions against each slide. For example, if I want to mention a couple of them, you see, for instance, slide number 9, which has the title, “Arab Apartment House in Haifa.” And then the short description says, "Arab's living in Israel have very special problems. They feel themselves to be second-class citizens."

The next slide says, "Girls' face," which, when you look into it through the slide tray, which we digitised, we could actually see some girl portraits. Some really powerful portraits. And then the description says, "They are harassed. Their lands have been taken and confiscated, and their children suffer educational deprivation." And the next one, slide number 11, says, "War Vehicles." The description says, "Israel is a land of conflict, not peace."

I just want to quickly go through another two slides, because it gives you a cityscape of Nazareth, and it says, "Yet here in Israel, two thousand years ago, the Prince of Peace was born. Here, God brought peace to man." So, you can see how religiously charged this statement is. It's a kind of theological argument that this was the Holy Land, and the Prince of Peace was born here, probably referring to Jesus.

The next one, titled "Arab Begging," depicts an Arab man begging on the street. But the description is quite paradoxical. It says, "Are there any signs of hope today in this divided nation? Are there any models of reconciliation?" And then the answer is, "Yes, there are."

In his House of Hope newsletter, which was published in Israel—and in Autumn 1997—he writes—and he asks himself an interesting question—it says, "When I watch the news on television, I cannot take in all the world's problems at once. I can only deal with a little part of it. So, if I call for peace, am I a naive man?" So, he asked himself, "Am I a naive man with a fading hope?" And he answers, "No, I am not."

So, that was very interesting for us, that this man is so hopeful. It seems there is some sort of genuine hopefulness there, that we have to get together. In his newsletter and writings, he also wrote a couple of books on "Sulha," a traditional Arab peacemaking practice, and he wrote about the House of Hope. He was somewhat positive about it, and this was in 1997. This is almost 10 years after the conference at Coventry cathedral. But this was the point, I think that was a point of departure for us, that if in 2025, he asked himself the same question, what would that answer be?

And I think through our conversation, we probably think of House of Despair now, rather than House of Hope. And of course, he's done an enormous amount of work in his capacity, but you can see his preoccupation was really the Arab Israelis within the state of Israel's border. And probably quite rightly, because he lived there and was an Arab Israeli himself. So, you can see that he genuinely wanted to enhance the quality of life for Palestinians who lived there, in Shafar-‘Amr, which is actually a Palestinian town. It was a Palestinian town until 1948.

I think that was a point of departure for us, how we can respond to these slides, these descriptions, and this kind of archive that we have here. Probably we didn't want to get into House of Hope very much, but speaking to Heba as a Palestinian artist and an academic, and her own experiences—because we knew each other and we talked to each other about the situation—we asked what she feels when she looks at this slide tray found in the Coventry cathedral basement.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Thank you for sharing how you and all of us, together, have gone into this box. I wonder if it's ever been open before. The question of what we do with it and how we approach those words used by Jabbour—hope, reconciliation—what do they mean in the current context? And even then, I'm sure there were different interpretations at the time of his writing.

Could you say something about how this archive and these slides have been approached? And also, your particular collaboration that you've developed together?

HEBA SABBOUBEH: Thank you, Nirmal. Initially, I was reluctant, to be honest, to connect my work with the House of Hope, because as a Palestinian, having lived there and grown up there, and having moved to the UK just 10 years ago, I felt what kind of hope are we talking about. I personally have more frustration than hope. So, I was careful about this idea, because I wasn't sure how feasible or how linkable it was.

What joined us together, I think, first of all, three of us have the same research interests and similar backgrounds. That helped us a lot. Adding to this, on a personal level, we enjoy the same music, the same art, and we are good friends. So, when Mahsa and Reza first had access to the archive in the cathedral, they instantly linked it with my artwork, and they came and told me about it. What do you think, Heba? Shall we do something about this?

They thought of integrating some of my artwork and some of the memories and stories I had already shared with them, during our gatherings about my life in Palestine. I think, yeah, we can relate or not relate and respond to the book in our own way of telling the story. We tell it as I lived it in a way that all of my paintings usually represent a moment or represent a living story that I had. So that was the idea.

Then Mahsa and Reza started working on the introduction part of our book, and I started collating the relevant paintings that are mostly about homes, about towns, and joining them together, writing a small caption or story about them. We used to get together, and during the brush design process, we added some textile pieces, which are the Palestinian embroidery or Tatreez, as we call it in Arabic. So, each piece of this textile is like a piece of memory that we tried to also reflect in the book.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Yeah, it's incredible how you've responded, the three of you, by coming together to create a book which will be printed. Mahsa and Reza, as you say, have written the introduction, and then there's your words, and your paintings, images of your paintings, they're the substantial part of that book.

Is there something you'd like to share from these incredible paintings or the recurring themes in the paintings?

[00:23:03]

HEBA SABBOUBEH: Thank you, Nirmal. If you are aware of my paintings, I've been asked this question a lot, like why there are always women with a yearning look. I don't know, maybe it is reflecting how I feel at a certain moment.

So, most of the topics usually portray a lady, a woman who is in different positions, or children sometimes, and also towns and cities. I think I'm better at expressing my feelings in lines, in colours, rather than words. Each time I feel that I need to tell the world something or let some emotions out, I do that on canvas, and I start painting.

NIRMAL PUWAR: There are certain kinds of brush strokes you use, and particular kinds of colours that prevail. There are often, as you say, figures of women of different ages, particularly elderly women, and also buildings, as we have in the image, where there's the house painted in a kind of white beige and flowers in the foreground. There's a lot of buildings in your paintings.

HEBA SABBOUBEH: You know, if you see the towns I draw, they have a kind of intimacy, that closeness, like buildings hugging each other, very close to each other. You feel some warmth. I came from a town—from a village—and the centre of the town, or the middle area, is usually crowded. Still, it's a sweet crowd, not suffocating or claustrophobic. It's very intimate, like a big family in that small space.

And with the colours, I try to reflect the original colours with a little bit of abstraction in it. Many of the paintings that have buildings, you may see an old woman who is sitting alone on the steps, because in my mind, I see people forcibly displaced or left to find jobs in the city, and that old lady is still waiting for these people to come back and to feel that life again, when the children were children, not adults and left.

So, yeah, part of it is from my personal perspective, because I have a house where I reside. My father gave me my grandfather’s house to reside in when I visit Palestine, and it is one of these old houses with a dome on one of the rooms. It feels really great to be there, surrounded by the neighbours saying good morning to everyone. You feel like you're living in one space together.

NIRMAL PUWAR: So, where is this house?

HEBA SABBOUBEH: In Anabta.

NIRMAL PUWAR: In your chapter in the book, that says, "And there is that old lady", it's really intriguing in terms of how you say there's this displacement, migration for different reasons, and she's waiting for people to return. And of course, it could be a displacement, not only with work, but with violence.

HEBA SABBOUBEH: Yes, forcible displacement. So, technically, that area where I go back home used to be lively. So, what does the word "hosh" mean—the courtyard? So all the houses are surrounding a courtyard, and that means the extended family will have different little homes around that courtyard.

Recently, many of my relatives who share ownership of the courtyard and the houses around it have travelled for different reasons, whether it is just moving to another place that is more modern, or because of the occupation killing their chances to develop or to do anything. So technically, when I'm there, I'm there with one of my father's cousins, who is a lady in her 70s. After some time, I think to myself, “When she goes, who will be? It is me."

Despite the fact that I'm living here in the UK, I'm still feeling that maybe one day I'll be that old lady who's waiting for everyone to come back and make it lively again. When my boys were younger, they would be kicking the ball around, and it was a happy place with the laughter and all of that. But currently, everything looks like a dream. Can that be lively and happy again? I doubt it with the current situation.

NIRMAL PUWAR: The political issue of keys and homes is so big in Palestine because of the displacement, forced displacement. People, like the elderly figure, are the guardians in a way. You also try to be a guardian, in a way, by going back. But that guardianship is so just… on hold, and the possibility is just disappearing.

HEBA SABBOUBEH: Being a Palestinian, you live in uncertainty. You cannot plan. You cannot expect what tomorrow will unfold. So, you live with uncertainty, really. This is part of our life.

Being there or thinking that I'm there, it's like part of the responsibility. The Palestinian-Israeli issue is an identity crisis. So, they try to wipe the identity of the Palestinians from the area. Despite being in the UK, I feel it and I say it loudly. I'm Palestinian and always will be Palestinian.

You hardly see Palestinians leave Palestine voluntarily. It is odd that someone likes to go outside Palestine and work or study. We like to stay in our homeland because once everyone is gone, there will be no Palestine, and we don't accept this idea, and we don't want that to happen.

NIRMAL PUWAR: This book, in many ways, is a register. It's a register. So, thank you for making it, the three of you, for bringing all your words together, and for combining Heba’s images.

Where would you like this book to circulate? I mean, certainly it's going to sit in the archives. That's something for us to think about.

REZA HAKIMINEJAD: It's a kind of pamphlet—a booklet. We're thinking of having some hard copies, if we can, and bringing them to the physical entity. I think, particularly with Heba’s paintings and words, it's really worth printing. So, we plan to have a hard copy first to test it and see how it looks in the real world, coming out of the digital space.

I think those paintings and those words are very powerful, and they are very emotional. And I think it definitely needs to be seen beyond the archives of the Cathedral.

MAHSA ALAMI FARIMAN: It would be interesting to leave a copy, a physical copy, next to the slides in this archive. So, in a couple of years, who knows, another group will have a read of our interpretation of an event of House of Hope in the 1980s, in 2025, and that was our interpretation at the time. And in a couple of years, when things have changed and been transformed in that piece of land called Palestine, that will add another layer to this archive. Then, year after year, different layers will be added. It will be interesting to see.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Yes, you generate a very moving response to this archive, but also, as you say, it's an alternative archive, it's an alternative index to Palestine, to Palestine-Israel, to the word hope.

And I'm looking at one of these pages, Heba, that says "Women in Black". And we mustn't forget, not only have you, as Reza pointed out, done the paintings, but you've also written the words. Is there something you'd like to share about the process of working on "Women in Black"?

[00:33:54]

HEBA SABBOUBEH: So, this painting, as are many others, is documenting a certain moment, a certain memory that I passed through. In this painting, you can see the lady with a sad look in her eyes. Why is that? Because of all that this lady encountered. It is very difficult to describe a painting, because usually paintings describe themselves. But as you can see here in the background, there is that little girl, which represents my thoughts when I was a child, what I think about life.

Childhood should be linked to life, to happiness, to flowers, to toys, to things like that. But growing up as a child in 1987, I was a child in the first Intifada. I remember how I spent my days in curfew, moving from one house to another, to make sure that I purchased things for my mother to cook for us. It wasn't an easy childhood. It's true that it is personal memories. These paintings are my personal experience and memory, but I'm sure that it is the same for many other children and women now. Looking at our history, it's repeating itself — the same videos I see right now about Gaza. Some of them I lived, some of them I know someone who lived it. So, it is continuing. I believe this depicts many people feeling that way. So, I hope the message is received, and that I was able to transmit their voices louder.

NIRMAL PUWAR: This repetition that's happening over time, and as you said, through different generations, and what you have this bodily and visceral memory of as a child, moving from house to house, is then repeated in different ways, of the violent aspects coming out of the screens today.

And if you don't mind me asking, you often felt—not felt—but it was reality that the Israeli soldiers were very close to your home.

HEBA SABBOUBEH: My childhood memories were that I lived in a house with very big land around it. So even in the curfew, I remember that there would be soldiers walking. We call them “mousheh”, meaning walkers. And even in your land, in your own zone, they will still shout at you, “go inside, get inside your house”. So, these memories shaped a lot of my childhood and my personality. I think the resilience that the Palestinians have comes from the tough life they live; that is prominent. Most Palestinians have that type of resilience.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Are there any other chapters you'd like to share from the book? This one has poppies growing and cactuses growing up the buildings, the layered buildings.

HEBA SABBOUBEH: Yeah, so this image, every cactus plant is a symbol that there was a Palestinian village. So, in 1948, the Nakba time, many Palestinian villages were totally wiped off the map, completely destroyed. Till now, you can find inside the land of 1948, you can see the cactus plant, which says that there was a Palestinian village.

The poppies, as well, it is a Palestinian symbol. But here, I probably was too hopeful or too happy painting this, making the poppies higher than the homes themselves. But also, if you look at the metallic steel protection, all of them forming a heart, which is common in Palestinian old architecture or steel work. Shaping hearts also symbolised that we are peaceful people. We like to live peacefully. We appreciate love. We appreciate colours.

MAHSA ALAMI FARIMAN: I remember you also mentioned something about the window. In one of our conversations, you said something about the fact that, at the same time the House of Hope project was happening, we were talking about that image—that slide—of the army vehicles going somewhere. And you talked about the sound of boots, of soldiers, that you would hear as a child. And then you spoke about the stones, and how the architecture of the window changed.

HEBA SABBOUBEH: Yeah, thank you for reminding me, Mahsa, about this. So, as I said, I was a child in the 1987 Intifada. Our family's house was on the main street. The family house used to have a front window for the living room and a veranda that faced directly onto the main street. So, when there were incidents or some children throwing stones, these stones would come to our house and break the glass.

Growing up, I saw how that window changed. So, first of all, it was a very big window with glass only. Then I remember that my father started to put steelwork on it, bars to protect against raids or occupation attacks, or whatever. After that, to make sure that this glass is not broken, the third phase was that he added a mesh of one centimetre by one centimetre to prevent the stones from breaking the glass and hurting someone inside. So, when I started studying architecture, I realised how the window developed from being open to nature, to being more restricted, first with bars, then with that mesh. That indicates how people respond to secure safety for their families, really.

REZA HAKIMINEJAD: It's very interesting that your cityscapes and your paintings of the buildings and houses are quite cheerful generally. A kind of contrast with the portraits that you have. I remember that in the first instance, you selected nearly 50, 60, 70 paintings for the book, and then you had to go back and there was a difficult task of just choosing 10 or 12 out of them.

But even looking at the first collection we had, all of the paintings of the city are quite cheerful. But it is very much in contrast with the individual portraits that you can feel the sorrow, you can feel the pain, especially in the portraits of the woman in your paintings.

HEBA SABBOUBEH: This is a great question, Reza. Well, I believe that being in Palestine makes me happy. Being in one of the cities or towns, it's a happy place. I'd love to think it's happy. That's why I always reflect it in a positive way, but sadness is always in the background because of the living experience. When it comes to human beings, yeah, we are deeply affected by the occupation and what's going on there. But we live on hope and dream of the city or town being a happy place, or we remember the past—how I heard it from my grandmothers—how it was a happy, peaceful place and all of that.

So, I think it is my way to cling to that hope, or to cling to life, that it is a happy place, despite what we are going through. We want to recreate this image one way or another, but sadness is always there. It is very domineering on the people there.

MAHSA ALAMI FARIMAN: I think it was very obvious in your paintings how, in a different scale, you are looking at the violence and hope, like the scale of the body is more of a display because it's just, you know, it's like how you hold on into your skin, into your body despite all the trauma that you go through.

But the painting itself becomes a tool for political imagination, of imagining hope through colours, through this cityscape of what it looked like before, and wishing or imagining that it would look like that once again. So, it's a powerful tool, I think, these paintings and the words that you choose.

HEBA SABBOUBEH: I think I already created an image from the elderly people's talks. I lived in an extended house with a grandmother. As a child, I loved hearing about the past from her. I would ask, tell me how it was, how it used to be, and all of that. It is like a paradise when she described it. They were living as simple farmers, really, not too much money, not high education, just simple farmers. But for her, Anabta was like a paradise, and, yeah, “Jannah”. That sticks in my memory as a great place, as it was. Palestinians, wherever they go, they say nothing is like home, nothing is like Palestine. So, despite everything, we have that unbelievable, unjustifiable connectivity with the space, with our space, with Palestine.

NIRMAL PUWAR: It’s incredible how your grandmother's stories are still with you. They're part of your practice, they're part of your reflections. They become dreams amongst the violence. I wondered what we could do to think about both the violence and the dreams in this place, in the place of the cathedral. How, perhaps, we could imagine and work with those imaginations without erasing the political histories of violence and genocide.

So, in a while, we will go upstairs… We'll walk up the stairs to the Chapel of Industry, which was designed for the cathedral to have a link with the city, always looking out, looking in, and working across the city. There, we will reflect together on what else one could dream of in the cathedral, again, alongside a recognition of the political histories and the political displacement.

[00:47:22]

Right, we've moved, as we can hear from the echo from the archives, up to the Chapel of Industry. Now we're all standing amongst each other at the central point.

Heba is going to share a story that she's written, or rather a letter she's written, and read it to us. You can also read it in the booklet. It's there at the end of the booklet.

HEBA SABBOUBEH: A letter written to my son Adam on his birthday. Adam was born during the second Intifada. Around his birth date, we were living under curfew for a few months, and there was no access to hospitals. We decided to rent a house for a month in Nablus to guarantee accessibility to hospitals for when the delivery day came. We agreed with my doctor, Dr. Abdul Latif Dharami, to induce the birth on the 8th of July 2002, to guarantee that I reached the hospital by ambulance. The ambulance picked me up during the curfew in Nablus, and Adam was born at 12:20 at Al-Etihad Hospital in Nablus.

During Adam's pregnancy, we were living in the family house, which consisted of multiple stories and was located on top of a hill. My parents-in-law lived on the ground floor, and we lived in a flat on the first floor. In April 2002, the Israeli army occupied our house and forced us, my eldest son Kemal, who was 18 months old, and his father, to leave our flat and locked all of us in my parents-in-law's house.

While they occupied the whole building and prevented us from even going to our garden, we were jailed with my parents-in-law, in their house for two weeks. They took all the entry point keys, our passports and mobile phones, and converted the house into a military base filled with hundreds of soldiers who parked their tanks outside the house. They chose the place specifically to watch over our town. It was the same time as the Jenin massacre in April 2002.

During those days, I remember that the Israelis lifted the curfew for two hours and allowed only two people to leave the house. My father-in-law and Kemal's father left to do some shopping for essentials, while I was locked in the house with my mother-in-law and Kemal. During the two-hour curfew, I remember my father and my brothers came to check on me, but they were not allowed in by the Israeli army. I wasn't able to speak to them or see them face-to-face, so I just waved to them from the window and shouted, "I'm okay," and they left.

Twenty-one years later, history is repeating itself again. Jenin camp is demolished. People are kicked out of their homes. Innocent people are killed and tortured, and there is probably another pregnant lady somewhere in Palestine trying to reach the hospital to deliver her baby peacefully.

Writing this, I feel like I'm living the trauma again. I'm sorry, Palestine. I'm sorry, Adam, for bringing up sad memories on your birthday. You and your brother have been my absolute pleasure and always will be. Happy birthday, my beloved, strong, resilient, handsome Adam. I love you so much.

NIRMAL PUWAR: Thank you for writing those words and reading them and sharing them with us here today. This leads me to think of so much, as well as the fact that we're in this Chapel of Industry, and perhaps there are some reflections either of you want to share on what the cathedral could become in these current times.

[00:52:34]

And how would you like to intervene, perhaps in the building, the archives, or the ruins? And as architects, is there anything in particular that comes to your mind or you'd like to dream up for the cathedral?

MAHSA ALAMI FARIMAN: I think for me it would be interesting to look at the cathedral as a radical space of possibilities. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about political imaginations, and whether there is a chance for political imaginations in this cathedral, in any space, or in different spaces, such as where we stand right now. It would be interesting, especially as an urbanist myself.

I would like to see how the ruins, basically on the other side of the cathedral, can be used as an urban civic space, maybe. It takes me back to what Doreen Massey calls "thrown togetherness," really, and how a space can be used for making a dialogue or for engaging with differing or often contrasting urban realities.

I think it would be interesting to think of using this space otherwise, in the current hostile environment that we are living in, with all the border regimes of war, of white supremacy, far-right ideologies, global neoliberalism, and capitalism. And thinking about how making urban spaces through openness and diversity can be really interesting as a possibility that can really come true. It's a bit of a utopian idea, but these places and these spaces are the places of becoming, of possibilities. So that would be good to see.

HEBA SABBOUBEH: To add to this as well, the cathedral can serve as a place that joins people, to be a stage for all voices, a space that can be one day a market, supporting local businesses. The next day, it can be a stage for a performance or a platform for reciting poems.

REZA HAKIMINEJAD: I think all has been said, but yeah, probably I just would quote Judith Butler, who wrote at the end of her essay, “The Compass of Mourning”. She wrote it a couple of days after October 7. And she again tries to imagine something that is completely unachievable. She said, "For this we need our poets, we need our dreamers, the untamed fools, the kind who know how to organize." It was a really powerful statement that she made, going back to the struggle of Palestine, about how you can create or even how you can imagine a space. And she also says it may sound naive.

But your architecture also makes the space and contributes, because architecture is very much entangled with power and politics, obviously. At the same time, it can facilitate those things that Mahsa was mentioning, for example, in terms of bringing people together and creating a diverse space, which is very difficult to do; it's not really something that architecture does naturally.

I think that the way society interacts with the space can make the space a different kind of space. Coventry cathedral has that kind of essence, I think. It seems there was or has been some sort of imagination behind some of the activities happening here. Some people may take it with a pinch of salt, you know, they really tried hard to unlearn their own orthodoxy, the religious, traditional orthodoxy. What they are doing here, sometimes I feel, actually is quite progressive, and so for that reason, I think this is a very special place.

References

Judith Butler (2023) “The Compass of Mourning.” London Review of Books 45(20): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning.

Elias Jabbour (1996) Sulha Palestinian Traditional Peacemaking Process, Montreal, NC: House of Hope Publications.

Elias Jabbour (2015) Echoes of Peace, Montreat, NC: House of Hope Publications.

Thomas C Cook (ed.) (2000) A personal call to peace: an interview with Elias Jabbour, Montreat, NC: House of Hope Publications