The Living Room
Sandi Hilal, Shafiq Omar Kakar

Located between the domestic and the public sphere, Al-Madhafah, in Arabic, is the living room dedicated to hospitality. It has the potential to subvert the role of guest and host and give a different socio-political meaning to the act of hospitality. It seeks to mobilize the condition of permanent temporariness as an architectural and political concept able to challenge the binaries of inclusion and exclusion, public and private, guest and host. It activates the rights of temporary people to host and not to be eternally a guest, the right to claim life in the new destination but without feeling obliged to revoke the desire to belong to the life back home. Al Madhafah is constituted by a network of various living rooms activated in six different locations: the house of Yasmine and Ibrahim (1) and The Yellow House in Boden supported by the Public Art Agency Sweden (2), ArkDes Museum in Stockholm (3) Fawwar refugee camp in south of the West Bank (4), in the living room of Sandi and Alessandro in Stockholm supported by the Arab Fund for Art and Culture (AFAC) (5) and the at Vanabbe Musemm in Eindhoven with Shafiq Omar Kakar
Sandi Hilal is visiting professor at Lund University and co-director of DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency) an architectural studio and residency program centre around the relation of politics and architecture. Latest publication, Refugee Heritage (Art and Theory, Stockholm 2022), and Permanent Temporariness (Art and Theory, Stockholm 2021).

Shafiq Omar Kakar born in Laghman, Afghanistan, immigrated to The Netherlands in 1998 where he now lives and works as an artist, curator and researcher. Shafiq coördinates the Van Abbemuseum Living Room ( Madafah) since 2019. He also coordinated The Madafah in U-Jazdowski contemporary art museum in Warsw Poland. He initiated a long-term research project called The Afghan Art Research Project in the Van Abbe Museum in The Netherlands.