Project

Today, Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia are home to 85 percent of the world’s population. By 2100, these regions will still account for more than 80 percent of humanity. By then, Africa will have become the most populous continent, surpassing Asia. Qatar and its neighboring region sit at the geographic and economic crossroads of this demographic transformation.

We traced this arc because it encompasses both traditional and modern forms of living. Rather than a chain of crises, it represents an arc of potential, in which we can consider how much might change and what traditions should be maintained. Most of the arc is mountainous; the landscape itself resists a wholesale modernization, though its breathtaking beauty faces mounting pressure.

The smartphone has had a colossal impact on the arc, connecting the most isolated cultures, questioning the need to leave the countryside for the city. The handheld internet introduces limitless flows of information, fashion, news, and politics, enabling entirely new economies. Large parts of the arc in Africa were colonized until the 1960s, and in Central Asia until the early 1990s. Colonization has left disruptive legacies of apartheid, and in Asia, large scale agriculture-related technological and nuclear experiments that are currently being rethought and remediated. In many cases these experiments partly continue. What is heritage then in post-colonial conditions?

The Arc is replete with new typologies, such as coding schools in barns aiming to train the next generation of ruralists in the digital languages of the future, while maintaining ancient traditions like shepherding. These typologies introduce new relevancies and offers new prototypes for inhabiting the earth in sustainable ways.

As cities become more and more congested and expensive, maybe a pivotal moment has come: we can conceive a future that reverses the universal movement to the city that has robbed the countryside of its inhabitants. This exhibition examines “new” ways to inhabit the countryside, which together show that the city is not the only model for pursuing a rich and fulfilling life.

Qatar Preparatory School (QPS) is the main site of the exhibition. The classrooms are places of research, dialogue, and production, working as exhibitions within the exhibition, and the school is an active educational environment where ideas about desert life, cultivation, and sustainability take shape. The public program evolves over the course of a year through workshops, lectures, and collective experiments with students, teachers, and invited contributors. The material developed throughout the process will form a Manifesto, published at the end of the exhibition year.

Outside, the school grounds are used as a field for desert farming and innovation. Date palms, alfalfa, cauliflower, broccoli, squash, tomatoes, eggplants, petunias, and aloe vera grow across the open landscape, showing how new irrigation and cultivation methods can turn arid soil into fertile ground. At the center, a high-tech greenhouse combines hydroponics, floating beds, vertical towers, and indoor farming systems. Three shade tunnels test different strategies for growing in extreme climates, and an electric tractor points toward a cleaner and more efficient agricultural future. At the National Museum of Qatar, a parallel installation presents the exhibition’s main themes and introduces the research underway at QPS.