How do we perceive the city through the interplay of presence and absence? How do we narrate its story across time? And how might we recover what disappears from place and what is erased from memory?

In this talk, architect and researcher Iyas Shahin explores a range of artistic and research-based practices across photography, cinema, drama, and literature, examining them as visual and textual modes of storytelling through which places are read, interpreted, and reimagined. Moving through the intertwined notions of presence, marginality, and absence, the presentation considers how representations of the city reveal not only what is visible, but also what remains hidden.

The session will also present Shahin’s recent project, Memory Maps in the Geography of Post-Occupation – Returnee ’67, which seeks to reconstruct the geographical and social landscapes of the occupied Syrian Golan through individual and collective memories formed after 1967.

The talk will be held in Arabic. To register, please complete the form here.

Iyas Shahin is an architect, academic researcher, and photographer whose work focuses on documenting and interpreting the city. He holds a PhD in Architecture and is a co-founder of IWLab. His research and artistic projects have received several awards, including Informalities, The City as Body, The Fabric of Barada, Architectural Theatre, Spatial Justice – Damascus, and most recently Returnee ’67.