Emilio Distretti

Emilio Distretti is a researcher, writer and educator interested in the decolonial reuse and deactivation of colonial architecture. He engages with critical research methodologies and pedagogy, centred around the entanglements between repair, reparations and decolonisation in the Mediterranean basin and in the Horn of Africa. In his writings and collaborations, Emilio deploys and narrates the public dimension of architecture as a space and a tool for repair from colonialism and its racialised, social and economic aftermaths, a space for critical knowledge production around preservation. He lived in Palestine, where he was the Director of the Urban Studies and Spatial Practices program at Al Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences in Abu Dis, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kenyon Institute (Council for British Research in the Levant) in East Jerusalem. Emilio is a Research Tutor at the RCA – School of Architecture in London..