Dongola creates art books offering unconventional perspectives on art and contemporary topics in the
Middle East,
North Africa and South West
Asia region today. Based in Beirut and named after the ancient Nubian city of trade, commerce and culture, Dongola is an experimental intellectual and cultural venture, generating trajectories beyond individual fields of knowledge.
The Dongola Architecture Series (DAS) is a biannual book series that offers unique insight into Arab culture through the lens of its most iconic contemporary
architects, and attempts to grapple with our environment's past and present to better inform how we design our future. Each issue focuses on a specific architect's formation and processes, and on their contributions to regional knowledge production. DAS is not an endorsement of style, but rather of methodology, affect, and synchronicity with the world. It is an investigation of the ethics, politics, positioning, and decision-making processes of the people tasked to analyze, build, and narrate the world we live in. DAS probes into how architects interrogate heritage, engage with labor and gender roles, develop economies, establish social systems and, perhaps most importantly, produce culturally specific knowledge.
