Below are the first pages from my book Off Centre / On Stage, published by Khatt Books, in parallel with the exhibition of the same name at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. As my other book, Showpiece City, neared publication during the COVID lockdowns, writing this helped me keep sane. It was, at once, everything I forgot to say in the first book and a chance to recollect what I’d just completed. The book includes dozens of never-before published photographs of Dubai in the late 1970s. Monocle calls the writing “silvery” (?). For Elephant, Farah Abdessamad wrote this very nice review. You can purchase the book from Khatt or Art Jameel.
“There was, like, nothing there.”
Could there possibly be a patch of land, whether above or below the seas, that has no history inscribed onto it, that bears no impressions for distinguishing a then from a now?
I’ve heard it said, in ways meant to astonish, that Earth is an archive – one big amassed pile of hard evidence informed by time – and that the air you breathe right now is scented with wafts of cargo heaved by kinetic caravans long past. The hurling globe, for all we know, is a caravan, headed in no particular direction and burdened with testimony to universal origins. And, yet, confronted with this knowledge, someone might still say there is no history in Dubai, as if the mass of the universe revolved around a single swathe, following a centripetal curve to create a tiny, interior void shielded from any encounter with cosmic fatigue. How could Dubai be more exceptional than that?
Even if I disregard Dubai’s part in the creation story and stick to the last several decades, I still encounter people who fall for the ruse that someone, around the Gregorian year 2000, reset Dubai’s galactic clock to 0. Usually, I just nod my head to avoid any conflict, but, if I queried these “nothing-sayers” about their thoughts on Dubai, they might concede, rather impatiently, that, naturally, there was something there, but nothing of significance. And that’s really what we are dealing with: the refusal of significance, or the mistaken association of significance with gravitational weight, or the disregard for all but a mite of time. The stacking of burdensome heft – say, in Baghdad, London, and even New York, the nineteenth century’s city of amnesia – signalled empires in the past, the outcomes now compacted in archaeological fields or pressed into massive water control systems, granite edifices, and concrete skyscrapers. If an earthly surface is not bedecked with mountains of calcite and forests of timber, then there is somehow the requirement for evidence of such resources being brought to it from elsewhere. I’ve heard it said, too, that cities are archives, their weighty buildings and channels of infrastructure creating a text once written and now read. OK, but only if you concede that archives are scrabbled together by winners, the literal arks of Noahs not subsumed by the surge. Somewhere else, in another time, what’s not stored in human-crafted edifices washes upon an unsuspecting shore, both resistant to and reconstituted by time.
Many nothing-sayers might enjoy the excuse that they are not familiar enough with Dubai. Possibly arriving from someplace else other than Dubai, they profess that they would “read about the city, if only there was something to read.” (Nothing, here, being the excuse for nothing.) Nothing-sayers can be long-time residents, even born and raised; they can also be official voices narrating on-flight video segments, CNN commercials, and launch promos for new gated communities.
Bantering about Dubai and nothing isn’t just silly: the wilful ignorance can be weaponised for the sake of a win, even the financial kind. A participant may engage in it like a card game whose rules are not yet written and can, therefore, be rigged. But really, by the time the nothing-sayer snickers, thinking they’ve shaped the game to their advantage, the hands have been dealt and folded, the chips collected. The past, seeping in from the sidelines, orchestrates a reckoning.
This book has materialised because of a trove of salvaged photographs. Dusting them off and then illuminating them on light tables and scanning beds can make sense of how nothingness became such a thing in Dubai. The explanations, in the end, might make you a little sympathetic towards the nothing-sayers. Duped, you could say, by a sleight of architecture.
The book focuses on the mid and late 1970s. There was something in Dubai then, something being made but also something being erased. In those years, architects – whose calling cards have fattened Dubai’s swirling Rolodex of experts – charted a choreography for amassing dense materials into buildings, roads, septic lines, and electricity pylons. Something was being arranged for. As the crescendo of bulldozers, dredging machines, road rollers, and concrete mixers flattened palm-frond farms and crushed century-old houses, the experts enunciated a man-made landscape. One engineer augured: “A virgin coastline will become a concrete plane.” From nothing to nothing. Largely indifferent to Dubai history, they preferred the cliché, breaking ground – land making way for human invention. A new start required the agitation of systems already underway. A scrape with a ceremonial shovel, and then a chasm. Land, disregarded for its evidence of time, bore the excavation to be filled in with new time.