From Nubia to Warsaw
July 26–August 23, 2025
Playful Cartographies is a nine-day program based in Warsaw, Poland which examines the museum as a site of study to explore heritage and climate, using the Faras Cathedral collection—once in Nubia and now dispersed between Khartoum, Warsaw, and beyond—as a point of departure. There are five full scholarships and five partial scholarships available for applicants.
Part of the ongoing AA Visiting School workshop series Climate Cartographies, the Playful Cartographies programme in Warsaw explores the evolution of heritage discourse in the 1960s, a period in which the city played a significant role. Through the collection from Faras Cathedral in Nubia and the museum as an institution connected to various sites of extraction, the program will investigate the infrastructure—both visible and invisible—that is necessary to sustain heritage. The Faras collection was excavated in the 1960s as part of the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia, a campaign deeply embedded in the geopolitics of the Cold War and liberation movements.
The Visiting School’s agenda in Warsaw examines the intersection of climate change and heritage, while considering innovative ways of mapping these themes using game design as a medium, with tools such as Unreal Engine and Unity.
The program is open to current architecture and design students, PhD candidates, post-docs, and young professionals. Students will have the opportunity to present their work to the public on the final day of the program in a session entitled Gift to Warsaw.
The Faras Gallery at the National Museum of Warsaw serves as a starting point for rethinking the role of the museum in the context of the current climate(s).
The program is led by Suha Hasan and Teaching Assistants Joanna Lalowska and Aakarsh Singh, Contributors to Playful Cartographies include Abdulla Sabbar, Adrian Chlebowski, Agnieszka Wujec, Ala Younis, Alfred Twardecki, CENTRALA, Charlotte Joy, Dorota Michalska, Janek Simon, Kaja Kusztra, Kuba Snopek, Kyrill Kunakhovich, Mariam Elnozahy and Rado Ištok, Robert Konieczny, Tomasz Michalik, WXCA and others to be announced soon. The program was developed in consultation with Dobrochna Zielińska and the team at the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw.
For further queries please send an email to: climate.cartographies@aaschool.ac.uk / visitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk
