Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi worked with Nairobi-based artists and architects who set out to draw Dadaab in its myriad forms, as Siddiqi's research engaged a critical practice of knowledge production and the archiving of lived environments.

This talk examines the work of artists Deqa Abshir, Abdul Fatah Adam, Cave Bureau, and Elsa MH Mäki using Dadaab refugee camps on the Kenya-Somalia border as a referent. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi shows how a refugee camp’s aesthetic and material landscapes—even if born out of emergency—reveal histories, futures, politics, and rhetorics.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian affiliated with Barnard College and Columbia University. She was born in Chennai, India, and specializes in histories of architecture, modernity, and migration, centering African and South Asian questions of historicity and archives, heritage politics, and feminist and colonial practices.

She is the co-editor of Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration and Spatial Violence. Her scholarship aims to foreground histories of marginalized people and figures and promote practices of collaboration and support, especially concerning the lives and narratives of communities that have been systematically excluded or silenced. Thinking through objects, buildings, and landscapes, her work examines intellectual histories and diverse forms of esthetic practice and cultural production.