Armina Pilav
Armina Pilav is a feminist, architect, researcher, and lecturer at the Department of Landscape Architecture, The University of Sheffield. She received the Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for her Un-war Space research (2016-2018) developed at the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment – TU Delft. Armina’s research, practice, and teaching intersects and focuses on politics of re-presentation and re-production of physical, mediated space, bodily experiences in extreme conditions of the war destruction, or other disaster condition. Armina uses cross-media tools, psychospatiality and radical observations to explore ecologies of transformations of rivers, land, and related natural forms, architectures, and society during and after the wartime. Her work explores and at the same time creates different processes and spaces such as archiving practices, transitional landscapes, impermanent organization of humans/non-humans within the post-traumatic landscape systems. She publishes in magazines and academic journals and exhibits regularly. Her recent research on the destruction of Sarajevo and Mostar and the inhabitants’ transformation of violence has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2018), and as part of the Architecture of Shame project in Matera in July 2019. Armina is a member of the Association for Culture and Art Crvena in Sarajevo.
»Our participation with Un-war Space Lab in Risk Change project brought us to witness and partly document violent spatial and social changes within the Post-Yugoslav space and Malta in the context of recent migration. We met many incredible humans involved in fighting and changing the political conditions of push-backs on different borders, listened to many stories, and learned from the people on the move and activists to change our artistic position and sometimes to forget about it. What remains essential in our view is to continue to expose the public-domain state and other types of violence towards migrants and activists. At the same time, we need to continue to organize resistant moments where anti-fascist politics and care for each other are effective in transforming everyday violence and spatial and social exclusion.«
– Armina Pilav