ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to make sense of spatialities in the context of Nubian displacement by looking at instances of architectural hiding, veiling and transversing as acts of resistance against epistemic displacement. The author explores trans-epistemic architectural practices and their strategies of sustenance despite a hegemonic master plan imposed by the state in the resettlement village of Qustul, her village in the Kom Ombo Valley in the south of Egypt. Agha argues that the Madyafa, an invention of displacement villages, just like many of their post-displacement inventions, are resisting practices of erasure brought in by agents of dominant institutions. The research also challenges categories of Western spatiality, namely, public-private dichotomies. The chapter looks at the history of the Madyafa as a history of escaping epistemic capture in a way to understand what transversality looks like in its architectural form.
