Opening at ICD Brookfield Place Arts Programme, this exhibition on the significance of Palestinian stone brings three full-scale limestone structures into one of the most relentlessly built cities in the world. These are not finished works. They are fragments, architectures that were never realised, developed in Bethlehem by AAU Anastas.
In Palestine, stone is both everyday material and contested resource, shaped by systems of access and restriction. What gets built is not just a question of design, but of circumstance.
Set in Dubai, that tension lands hard. This is a city built on speed, where materials arrive from elsewhere and completion is constant. Against that, Beam, Corbel, Ribs introduces consideration, heritage and intelligence. The exhibition is accompanied by a sonic composition by electronic musician Aho Ssan, a solemn and powerful vehicle for the monologue written by Palestinian writer Karim Kattan.
To understand how it all comes together, AD Middle East spoke to everyone involved.
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Malak Abu-Qaoud, Director of Arts & Events, ICD Brookfield Place
What was the original curatorial intention behind commissioning Beam, Corbel, Ribs?
This year we wanted to try something different and explore another medium by focusing on architecture and sound, and exploring how they come together in a raw space. I’ve always loved and respected the work Elias and Yousef do around the region, so when I decided that architecture and sound would be the main focus of this year’s show, I reached out to them. I trust their vision and can’t wait to see the sculptures in the space. We’ve worked together before, and they’ve been supportive of the ICD Brookfield Place Arts Programme.
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Elias and Yousef Anastas, AAU Anastas
How did the collaboration between structure, text and sound begin?
The collaboration emerged from within the trajectory of Stone Matters, a research project we initiated over twelve years ago to investigate the use of stone as a structural material in contemporary architecture.
While there is today a global return to natural materials, the position of stone in Palestine is particular. It is historically embedded, and at the same time deeply contemporary. It is the only construction material that can be sourced independently. In that sense, working with stone is not only a technical or architectural question, but also a political and cultural one.
Over time, this research unfolded through architectural elements—columns, lintels, vaults, slabs—gradually expanding toward larger assemblies. The exhibition became an opportunity to materialise fragments of unbuilt projects. These pieces are presented almost as suspended ruins, suggesting both presence and absence.
It is within this context that the collaboration with Karim Kattan and Aho Ssan developed. Their contributions do not describe the fragments directly, but extend their world. Text and sound open the work beyond its physical limits, allowing these fragments to exist as grounded objects and as projections from Palestine to elsewhere.
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When did the work start to feel personal?
What we design is not really a shape or a form, but a family of possible forms. We are not driven by attachment to a specific figure, but by an equation that brings together knowledge, craftsmanship, factories, references, and the way we practice architecture within a community.
This is where the work becomes personal.
A project succeeds when it approximates the shape of that collective—those who extract, fabricate, assemble, and inhabit it. No form is worth building if the chain that produces it is not actively part of its making.
The fragments carry these layers more explicitly. They become less about demonstrating structure and more about embodying stories and imaginaries. It is also where the work reclaims a right to fiction. Anything that escapes that risks becoming empty.
“In 1918, the British military ordered an urban master plan for Jerusalem, one of the bylaws states that all buildings within the old city will be built out of stone to create a unified built environment for Jerusalem. It became a political tool for annexing and reclaiming territories.” World-wide domination of concrete and steel ensued.
The work can feel raw at first glance. Is that deliberate?
What we are interested in is not an aesthetic of rawness. The exhibition is reduced to what we consider the degree zero of architecture: spanning, corbeling, stiffening. These are fundamental operations that define how architecture stands.
This simplicity is intentional. It creates a framework from which many interpretations can emerge. Stone plays a central role. It has often been pushed into the background or associated with exclusive architecture. But in Palestine, it is part of a common, domestic language.
Part of the intention is to free stone from that exclusivity—to reposition it as an open, accessible and contemporary material. What might be perceived as rawness is actually clarity.
Aho Ssan, Musician
What was your starting point in translating the work into sound?
My starting point was the stones themselves — not as finished objects, but as fragments of projects that were never built. There is something deeply suggestive in that: presence and absence held in the same piece. I spent a lot of time with the drawings Elias and Yousef sent me, and with Karim Kattan's monologues — short, oracular texts, meant to loop in several languages so that the listener doesn't always grasp where a voice begins or ends. From there, I began thinking of sound as another architectural element — not illustrating the sculptures, but building an acoustic space around and inside them. I wanted the composition to carry the weight and memory of the stone, and at the same time the lightness of what those fragments could have become.
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Where does your relationship with sound come from?
Sound has always been the most intimate way of reaching a place, a memory, a body. It is something I can sculpt, but also something that listens back. Its ambiguity is what draws me to it—it is invisible yet physical, fragile yet capable of restructuring a space. Working on Stone Matters pushed that even further, because I was dealing with a material that is, in many ways, the opposite of sound — dense, ancient, silent. The tension between those two is where a lot of the work happens.
Was there a moment that shifted your connection to the work?
Yes, reading Karim Kattan’s monologues, and in particular the voice of the fortress: "I am the fortress and the amplifier, the horn and tempest… I echo and protect, I shield shelter and shout." Reading that, I realised that in Karim's writing the stone is already sound — he had inscribed echo, amplification, thunder directly into the flesh of the text. The common monologue goes even further: "I sing the stonesong, the song of asteroids… I am stone and thunder." From that moment, the work stopped being about adding sound to sculpture and became about listening to what the stones were already saying. Everything I'm composing now comes from that shift.
