Call for US-based winner now open
Brooklyn NY
USA
Van Alen Institute and the Pan-African Biennale are pleased to announce Arafa C. Hamadi and the Bled el Abar Collective as the two Africa-based winners of the 2026 Re:Paris Prize.
The prize’s travel fellowship supports emerging designers as they conduct field research to study how design plays a transformative role in Africa and its diaspora—places once held to the periphery of architectural discourse, but are now increasingly appreciated as centers of innovation in sustainability, resiliency, and cultural preservation. Following their research, the winners will present their learnings at Van Alen in fall 2027 and the second Biennale in 2028.
An open call for US-based designers is now live on vanalen.org. Applications are due November 22.
Arafa C. Hamadi: Who Designs Knowledge?
Galleries and museums across Sub-Sahara Africa are increasingly adopting the language of decolonization, yet exhibition spaces often continue to reproduce Western museological aesthetics. Arafa C. Hamadi’s project Who Designs Knowledge? asks how exhibition design can instead become a tool for building narrative spaces rooted in African aesthetic and material cultures. Through research, institutional visits and engagements with local material practitioners, Arafa will explore and prototype alternative spatial approaches to exhibition-making.
Arafa C. Hamadi is a Tanzanian multidisciplinary artist and spatial designer with a background in architecture. They create both physical and digital work, aiming to realise fully immersive spaces that explore their identity in relation to their locality and the built environment, focusing on joy and tangible ways of connecting their community. Their current explorations are in exhibition design, having supported in the design for two major exhibitions at the Zeitz MOCAA in South Africa. They have also worked in scenography, 3D/VR work, installation art, and audiovisual art.
Bled el Abar Collective: Ifriqya: A Territory of Hospitality
Places of hospitality, including oases, tents, and wells, punctuate the North African Sahara. For millennia, they have been sites of dwelling, gathering, and cultivation; today they are also tangible acts of resistance against colonial legacies, the authority of nation-states, and extractive economic systems. Together with those who live there, the Bled el Abar Collective will map these places, learn their stories, and investigate the contemporary realities they reveal.
Founded in 2025 by Réunionese architect and landscape architect Vanessa Lacaille, Tunisian architect and journalist Mounir Ayoub, and Tunisian architect and farmer Hamed Kriouane, the Bled el Abar Collective is a nonprofit organization that advocates for experimental, socially engaged, and politically committed architecture, developed with the collectives who live in the territory of the Tunisian Sahara.
Jury comments
Winners were selected by jury members Nora Akawi, The Cooper Union; Ifeoma Ebo, Creative Urban Alchemy; Mark Gardner, Jaklitch / Gardner Architects; Kabage Karanja, Cave_bureau; and Mphethi Morojele, MMA Design Studio.
“The jury was pleasantly surprised not only by the depth, but the range of submissions,” said Mphethi Morojele. “Submissions ranged from Lesotho in the South to Tunisia in the North, and Van Alen Institute and the Pan-African Biennale are to be congratulated for this. The proposed research topics were all fresh and sought to balance scientific and artistic enquiry in ways that sought to dispel the usual tropes about spatial practice on the continent.”
“The proposal Who Designs Knowledge? meant sitting with the Pan African Biennale’s own premise: Africa is not developing, it’s recovering—from extraction, from colonial violence, from more than a century of being narrated by the outsiders’ gaze,” said Mark Gardner. “We were all supportive of Arafa C. Hamadi’s immersive question on the structural language of design and curation.”
“The Bled el Abar Collective’s Ifriqya: A Territory of Hospitality is a deeply compelling framework to read the Sahara through the Sahara that sits outside historically extractive architectural and cartographic frameworks,” said Kabage Karanja. “It sets out a clear and present methodology to learn from the lifeblood of community and the land, while building a mesmerising repository of knowledge about this enigmatic part of Africa.”
About the Re:Paris Prize
In 2026, Van Alen Institute relaunched its long-running Paris Prize in Architecture (1904–97) as the Re:Paris Prize, with a new focus on reparative and regenerative urbanism across the global post-colonial landscape. Inverting the “Grand Tour” tradition, the Re:Paris Prize focuses on regions once held to the periphery of architectural and urbanist discourse. Winning designers receive a travel fellowship to conduct impactful field research, evolve their work to the next phase of development, and meaningfully engage with communities navigating histories of displacement and exclusion.
For the inaugural Re:Paris Prize, Van Alen has partnered with the Pan-African Biennale. Two Africa-based winners were selected from exhibiting designers at the 2026 Biennale, and a third US-based winner will be selected through an open call. Following their field research, the three winning designers will present their learnings at Van Alen in fall 2027 and the second Biennale in 2028.
