Lina Ghotmeh, Sara Ouhaddou, Bento, Valentine Umansky & Anissa Touati

The CIVA and the Thalie Foundation are joining forces for a weekend of encounters dedicated to earthen architecture in the context of the Warché exhibition presented at the Foundation in fall 2022.

Warché, meaning "worksite" in Arabic, offers an immersive experience of earthen architecture through the gesture of Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh - a carpet of 13,000 reused bricks covers the floor of the Foundation, creating an agora - and in dialogue with the sculptural and video works by Sara Ouhaddou and Emilija Škarnulytė.

Following the round table, collector-entrepreneur Miguel Carvalho will introduce his Melides Art project based in Portugal which will give a second life to the bricks of Lina Ghotmeh's installation.

The speakers of this panel discussion deploy a sustainable, historical and regenerative perspective on the city of tomorrow. Their construction practices either on site or in the workshop question the sustainability of production methods and their impact on our way of life. They favour the use of materials that return to the earth, such as bricks, raw earth, mycelium or workshop residues. They question the trace and therefore the circularity of materials, their regenerative principles and recycling in relation to construction.

Based on this observation, the city of the future is now being thought through the reappropriation of artisanal know-how, experimenting materials and using local channels. These attempts allow for a post-human and futuristic reflection on the city of tomorrow; where an ecological future is inscribed in the continuity of ancestral traditions and the past to imagine new architectural forms by making a cultural heritage perceived in a sensitive way - And poses a fundamental question: how to coexist on a territory? Should we live or cohabit?