Gabrielle Pintz, Virginia Black et Rosana Elkhatib se rencontrent à la Columbia University avant de former en 2016 le collectif Feminist Architecture Collaborative. Véritable bureau de recherche, F-Architecture s’évertue à déconstruire les politiques contemporaines du corps. De la théorie à la pratique, leurs projets bouleversent la frontière des genres, empruntant à la performance et à l’activisme pour créer une architecture engagée.

Produit à l’occasion de la Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans 2019, Right of Blood et Left of the Earth interrogent la notion de citoyenneté et dénoncent l’exclusion nationale ainsi que le contrôle patriarcal imposés aux femmes. Construites à partir de photographies de Libanaises donnant leur sang en protestation au jus sanguini (droit du sang) dont elles sont exclues, les œuvres révèlent les inégalités propres à la notion même de nation et rendent hommages à celles et ceux qui vivent sous une tutelle évolutive, aux Bidounes (« personne sans nationalité ») et aux autres « sans».

Citizenship is a designed threshold between the protection and denial of rights. Its reduction to the legal state between body and territory elides the complex, gendered, and racialized experience often held in the suspension of citizenship, where women are especially vulnerable to exception and expulsion. In 14 of the 22 Arab League nation-states, the subjectification of the national citizen depends on the proper circulation of paternal blood at the expense of maternal rights. In Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Mauritania, Oman, Somalia, and Sudan, jus sanguinis (“right of blood” as opposed to “right of the soil,” jus soli ) still excludes women from the reproduction of nationality by endowing only patrilineal bloodlines with the power to confer it. Building on the images of Lebanese women who gave blood in protest of gendered nationality laws in Beirut in 2011, this contribution to Al-Majhoola Min al-Ard —“she who has been vanished from the earth”—ruminates on the fleshy constitution of identity and the successive denials to incorporate the blood of women into jus sanguinis. Their diffuse and bodily tethers to land, state, family, and self are presented here as a material demonstration of belonging. A flag to The Children of Jordanian Women, to those living under an evolving guardianship, to the Bidoun and others “without,” we aim at a representation that opens the pages of documents that do not pass, that turns a gaze on custody withheld, that grasps with manicured claws at an Arab body-politic that readily consumes the bodies of women.