AFTER THE SHOCK: Art, Architecture and Risk
Sarra Kasri is an architect, researcher and lecturer at the Faculty of Engineering, UMONS, Belgium, and holds a PhD in Architecture. Recently appointed to a permanent academic position, she is developing a new interdisciplinary research direction connecting architecture, disaster risk management, research-action and artistic pedagogy.
For more than ten years, she has taught architecture and risk-related subjects, exploring how architectural education can help students understand vulnerable territories, uncertainty and the social dimensions of disaster. Her teaching combines project-based learning, field investigation, critical inquiry and artistic experimentation. She has also worked as a United Nations expert in disaster-risk management.
Her doctoral research examined architecture as a marker of risk and received a PUCA award in France. Her current interests include post-disaster territories, reconstruction, risk culture, collective memory, situated narratives and the contribution of contemporary art to architectural education.
Working with academic colleagues and territorial partners in Belgium, Lebanon, Italy and Greece, she develops comparative approaches to places affected by earthquakes, floods, conflict, displacement and reconstruction. Within AFTER THE SHOCK, she acts as the project’s scientific and creative lead, bringing together research, pedagogy, fieldwork and public experimentation.
AFTER THE SHOCK is an experimental university research project open to society, situated at the intersection of architecture, disaster risk management, artistic pedagogy and research-action. It grows from earlier research, teaching and field explorations into post-disaster territories and cultures of risk. My recent appointment as a permanent lecturer at UMONS provides the academic framework to launch this initiative through international collaborations.
The project proposes a travelling laboratory across Belgium, Lebanon, Italy and Greece—territories affected by earthquakes, floods, heatwaves, wildfires, conflict and reconstruction. Rather than treating disasters as isolated events, it examines how they continue to shape buildings, landscapes, collective memories, everyday practices and ways of inhabiting uncertainty.
Each situated experiment brings together students, inhabitants, architects, artists, researchers and local actors. Walking inquiries, oral narratives, archives, sensitive mappings, models and artistic interventions become both research methods and pedagogical tools. Participants do not simply receive information about risk: they observe, interpret and represent the vulnerabilities, memories and resources of their environments.
Art acts as an interface between scientific knowledge and lived experience. It makes invisible risks perceptible, creates space for plural narratives and supports the collective exploration of possible futures. Architecture is approached not only as a technical response to disaster, but as a material, social and cultural practice through which societies build a culture of risk.
With LINA Members, AFTER THE SHOCK can evolve through workshops, exhibitions, publications, installations, short films and public conversations. Its outcome will be an adaptable research-action protocol grounded in local knowledge, situated narratives and collective imagination.