COLLECTION: Sara Farha

Sara Farha (b. 1995) is a material scientist, architect, urban planner, and research-based artist. Farha creates art and design that responds to local needs, sensibilities, and environment. Interested in regional histories of cinema, food systems, and architecture, she believes in the strength and capability of interdisciplinary design and its potential to solve real-world problems. In November 2022, Farha debuted Datecrete, the world’s first date-pit based cementitious material with no traces of concrete or resin, at Downtown Design, Dubai. The novel material continues to be a core part of her practice: placing high importance on materiality, rejecting the detachedness of some current art and design practices.

Artwork statement

In our current city- and street- scapes, green is a spectacle. A consequence of the colonial legacy of mapping, shaping and managing our inhabitable environments. In urban planning, this legacy is driven into shape by satellite-view algorithmic approaches which collapse spatial narratives and reduce them into a process of mere number crunching.

In an act of deliberate dissent against the industry and its approach, Farha presents Greener Pastures, a series of datecrete sculptures. Datecrete, a material co-created by Farha and her partner Khaled Shalkha, is a date-pit based alternative to portland cement developed in their kitchen with no traces of concrete or resin. Farha utilizes her kitchen-made datecrete to critically mirror missed opportunities in recent developmental urban projects. Greener Pastures hopes to draw attention to the potentiality that lies within the urban planner and their blue-print in shaping a socially, culturally and historically informed space. Change begins with our understanding and perspective of green in the urban context. As a point of departure, Farha questions the efficiency of the current approaches used–even in academic training–to define and dictate where, how much and what kind of green is to be cultivated in a neighborhood, street, or city. Ultimately, to better understand and inhabit the desert biome, we must first be able to recognize green in its other tonalities.