TMR: What were the key morphological shifts\/distortions that Linda and yourself wanted to highlight in the book?<\/h4>\n

HISHAM BUSTANI: <\/b>I am interested in the socio-morphology of Amman. How spaces and places were used and felt as communal, collective, interactive spaces, and how that changed over time through authoritarian and neoliberal interventions designed to alienate and push people into separate, isolated emotional-physical enclaves. Take Daraj Far\u2019oun (the popular name then for the Roman Theater, located in the heart of the city), which was a collective space for communal celebrations. My aunt and father tell stories about how Amman would gather there to interact, play and mark the Eid festivities. Now, it\u2019s a closed, controlled \u201carcheological\u201d site with the surrounding spaces and plazas fenced in. A police patrol car is stationed at each one of its three entrances. This besiegement signals that the people of Amman no longer own their space and time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Sayl is another major socio-morphological change. Amman was historically called \u201cthe city of waters,\u201d and the water still lives on in toponyms like Ras al-\u2019Ein (the spring\u2019s head, its starting point) and Saqf al-Sayl, which has now transformed into a concrete and asphalt monstrosity. The water was part of Amman\u2019s everyday life: our family received their water supply from a spring that poured into the Sayl situated next to their home, where my father learned to swim. Every day, and on foot, he crossed the bridge to get to school and back, and later again to reach his father\u2019s shop in Talal Street before making his way back home again. Furthermore, my grandfather convened with other merchants from the souq at the end of each working day at al-Manshiyya coffee house, which was set up along the Sayl\u2019s bank. As such, the Sayl was the symbol of the city\u2019s closeness, its communal embrace. Its assembling magnet. By \u201cassassinating\u201d it, they condemned the city to fragmentation.<\/span><\/p>\n

LINDA AL KHOURY<\/b>: My collection of photographs reflects the incoherent transformations in light of these various distortions inflicted on my city. This proliferation of unstructured and random city planning is a distortion. For example, take the area of the 3<\/span>rd<\/span> circle. This was once a quiet suburban neighborhood, known for its villas that were built between the 20s and 50s. It has now been transformed into a chaotic and traffic-congested area due to municipal permits allowing for the construction of several storied hospitals in this tight residential area. Once there was no more land to build on, they allowed permits that stripped down the old villas in order to convert them to offices or even to demolish them entirely to allow for glass towers in their place. Stripped of most of the trees, it now looks ugly and grotesque. The area has become so crowded now and bears no resemblance to Amman\u2019s beautiful stone architecture that it is famous for. Even the hilly skyline that was Amman\u2019s key feature is no longer what it used to be.<\/span><\/p>\n

TMR: What do you see as the driving forces behind the distortion of the city of Amman?<\/h4>\n

HISHAM BUSTANI: <\/b>There are many factors affecting the transformation of the city, but the main one, the most powerful and significant, is authoritarian intervention. Every ruler of the city demands that history should begin with their arrival, disregarding everything that had come before. This<\/span> erasure<\/span><\/i> is a key concept in how the authorities deal with Amman. There is no respect for places of historic, social, and architectural significance. Any landmark, of any significance, can be torn down in a second and replaced with a glass-and-steel structure. When an Ammani reads Abdul Rahman Munif\u2019s <\/span>Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman<\/span><\/i> (trans. Samira Kawar), they are surprised to discover that only a few of the places mentioned in the book remain today.<\/span> There is no continuity. Even Munif, himself an influential writer in Arabic literature and the author of one of the most important books on Amman, has been erased from the city.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another factor affecting the city is how it is continuously controlled, designed, and redesigned which has led to a chronic and deepening sense of estrangement for its inhabitants. Building barriers prevents an integration between peoples and places, disallows the communality of a space. Control is a major aspect of contemporary Amman, which is now littered with surveillance cameras, its public plazas fenced or redesigned to include structures that prevent the crowd assemblies. Police are always being deployed to public spaces to set up wire or concrete fences locking in the area, and putting an end to any form of civil protest. Otherwise, many less threatening communal spaces are left to rot and look like a dump \u2014 a case in point is Amman\u2019s staircases (characteristic of Amman\u2019s hilly topography) which are heavily littered with garbage.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consumerism and cosmopolitanism \u2014 which are not unique to Amman \u2014 are destroying not only how the city feels, but how it looks, leaving behind ugly scars in their wake. The two abandoned glass towers on the 6<\/span>th<\/span> circle for example, built on what used to be the neighborhood\u2019s park, is a daily reminder of how Amman\u2019s esthetics are ignored, intentionally malformed, and stand as proof that the city\u2019s citizens are insignificant. They don\u2019t count. These towers are a massive insult to Ammanis and Amman, maintained as such to keep people small and humiliated in their city. Abdali\u2019s glass and steel Boulevard is another of these projects, dubbed by its makers \u201cThe New Downtown\u201d to replace what people always referred to as Wasat al-Balad \u2014 the heart of the city \u2014 where water used to flow. Now, this \u201cheart\u201d is besieged with private security on all entrances, preventing non-refined-looking citizens from accessing this sterile, extremely controlled, neoliberal haven.<\/span><\/p>\n

LINDA AL KHOURY:<\/b> A lot of Amman\u2019s beautiful old buildings have been demolished to make way for glass towers because they are cheaper to build. I find this grotesque not only because the structures are desolate and devoid of human presence and warmth, but also because in a country like Jordan, a parched nation, maintaining the cleanliness of those windows is a challenging task, which further adds to the distortion and the slovenly appearance of the city. That\u2019s not forgetting the energy expenditure that goes into warming them up in the winter and cooling them down in the summer. But there is also a visual distortion or grotesqueness because of the jarring contrast between the old and the new. There is no harmony in the architectural designs nor in the planning of the city.<\/span><\/p>\n

TMR: How would you describe this collaboration?<\/h4>\n

HISHAM BUSTANI: <\/b>This collaboration between text and photograph was a discussion of themes rather than a molding of forms. It was intended that each artist should work individually and separately, each, exploring their own personal relationship with Amman and its transformations. There was no intention of alignment. On the contrary, we wanted each artistic project (the text collection and the photo album) to stand alone, separate from each other, yet with an obvious and tangible continuity, as each part introduces new layers of understanding and interacting with the other.<\/span><\/p>\n

The bilingual choice for the project was also a crucial and peculiar aspect of the project. Amman is now full of <\/span>ajaneb<\/span><\/i> \u2014 white migrant laborers who work in international organizations and NGOs, usually with a superficial and limited connection to the city and its citizens, who lock themselves in gentrified \u201cauthentic\u201d neighborhoods like Jabal al-Lweibdeh, some never learning a sentence in Arabic during their years-long stay. The book is an attempt to engage those residents in Amman as well to draw their attention to their role in their temporary, transitory city, and their long-term effect on it.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that regard, I want to commend the work of the excellent literary translators \u2014 Addie Leak, Nariman Youssef, Alice Guthrie, Thoraya El-Rayyes, and Maia Tabet \u2014 for taking every care to maintain the<\/span> unique artistic style that I applied in the Arabic text, maintaining intact almost all of the nuances, hidden and dual meanings, in addition to the special local contexts. Nariman and Addie also contributed to the overall editing and proofreading. Thoraya is an Ammani herself, and Addie lived in Amman for a number of years, and is married to an Ammani, and between them, in addition to the wonderful work of Nariman, Alice and Maia, a very specific, and rare, form of biculturality was achieved in the translation.<\/span><\/p>\n

LINDA AL KHOURY:<\/b> When we took the decision to publish the book, and were ready to do so, we decided straight away that a bilingual version is important as Hisham said. Another bifold nature is that the book\u2019s creative content targets two audiences, avid photographers and literary intellectuals. We were very excited at trying out this innovative idea of combining the two perspectives in one book. The book should be looked at as two separate books in conversation with each other about a common theme which is the distortion of the city.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Rana Asfour<\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hisham Bustani and Linda Al Khoury talk to TMR about their new bilingual book and the urban distortions they bear witness to in Amman, Jordan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":29522,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,22,3147],"tags":[178,278,2698,2696,959,3157],"coauthors":[2165],"class_list":["post-29373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-photography","category-interview","category-tmr-36-architecture","tag-amman","tag-art-photography","tag-black-and-white-photography","tag-city-life","tag-jordan","tag-urbanism","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n