​Merve Anil and Georges Massoud, who teach the new unit ‘Nation Station’ discuss national identities, diasporic communities and subjectivity

Matthew: Merve and Georges, thank you so much for joining me! Where did the name for the new unit, ‘Nation Station’ come from?

Georges: In August, when we were writing this brief, the horrible explosion in Beirut happened, and we saw a photograph of a booth that had been set up in the city, and they’d taken a piece of old canvas and spray painted ‘Nation Station’ and hung it above the booth. It was set up to collect and distribute donations, it was a tiny fragment of the nation state, and yet it spoke to those everyday materials and spaces that can express the nation.

Merve: It was intriguing because the phrase can mean many different things. A station is both a fixed location for something, but it's also a verb that can apply to how you position and locate yourself. Both of us being part of a diaspora, that question of identity is very complex to us. We’re interested in how nations are constructed as imaginaries and how we carry them with us. You don't need to be positioned within a nation to be a part of it or to feel its power over you. We liked this idea of asking – where do you station your nation?

Matthew: So these complex ideas of national identity, of individual interactions with the state, how do you start to introduce students to them?

Merve: We started the year by asking students to look at everyday objects that operate as nation-building apparatuses, that enforce national identities. We're aware of how complex these ideas can be, so we wanted to break it down and start with something very tangible. For example, we have a student who is looking at the national census in India through the spaces involved in the process. We have another student who started looking at how the Russian government plants drugs to frame political dissidents. We start with these discrete moments and objects, and work outward from them to understand how they inform the relationship between state and individual.

Georges: It is really important for us that every student has a personal relationship to the project they are working on, how students place themselves in the context of the project, the community, the place or theory that they are studying. It's great to sit down and talk about abstract theory and concepts, but actually all of this theory comes from embodied experiences and from real life practice. And it is so important for us that students are able to not just talk about these things, but also understand them in a depth that stems from experience.

Matthew: On the subject of experience, do you want to explain your practice before you came to teach this unit? Where do you approach these questions from?

Merve: This is my third year teaching at the AA. I was teaching a Diploma Unit before with Christina Varvia, former Deputy Director of Forensic Architecture. Our former unit looked at the role of Architect as Investigator, using architectural tools to investigate spatial politics. The new Diploma 13’s agenda grew from some of those interests developed over the past two years. How does architecture enforce certain identities: whether they are gender identities, sexual identities or national identities?,This was how I first started to work with George. We are asking how the nation state can be read as a design project, and how architecture becomes a tool within that. I also work as an Associate within Public Practice, a non-profit research body of design professionals with Local Authorities. I'm interested in intersections between architecture and politics and how, as architects, we can use our skill sets to approach the built environment differently.

Georges: I was teaching the foundation last year, and when Merve approached me in the summer, we wanted to think about how to combine our interests. I am part of community interest collective called ‘Pride of Arabia’ which centres queer people from the MENA region and its diaspora. It is a space that emerged to challenge forms of representation and expression through our intersectional identities as Arab, Muslim, queer, diasporic, brown, etc . But more importantly, it is a space for reimagining a radical ecology community care. How can we imagine queer family networks that exist outside of state recognition, systems of community accountability, self-governance and non-transactional support for one another without relying on fundamentally hierarchical, patriarchal, misogynistic systems & values. I also run an architectural practice with Summer Islam called ‘Studio Abroad’, our work is primarily focused on material politics, rethinking our relationships to the materials we use and our culture of building and making.

Matthew: How do these approaches and ideas from your practice emerge in the way you teach?

Georges: It's always been really important to us that we break down this kind of hierarchy between tutor and student or like…

Merve: Master and Apprentice.

George: Yes! Exactly, we want to grow together with the students, and we acknowledge that we are studying topics and politics and identities that we don't have absolute knowledge over. We're here to learn together and to be able to communicate and unpack a lot of this.

Matthew: I really like this idea that despite the theoretical underpinnings of the work, it is grounded in everyday experience and in non-architectural, everyday material culture.

Merve: I don’t see these things as non-architectural, in fact these questions are very architectural but we need to consider the discipline more broadly. We want to study how politics operates through a set of spatial relations.

Georges: The architect does have a unique set of tools, and we are interested in thinking through what other forms an architectural project can take.

Image: Harry Pugsley