Van Alen Institute and Pan-African Biennale Reveal Africa-Based Winners of the Re:Paris Prize

Van Alen Institute and the Pan-African Biennale have announced 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, and one winner will be selected in December 2026.

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.

“I am extremely excited to have been selected for this prestigious prize and to expand my research through travel and local collaborations,” said Arafa C. Hamadi. “I believe that African histories and arts should be held within spaces that reflect the cultural stories they tell, and with this support, I look forward to collecting knowledge about indigenous spatial practices that I can bring into the museum and gallery space.”

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.

“This project describes and puts forward hospitality as a principle in which we — as humans — must consider ourselves guests of the Earth,” stated the Bled el Abar Collective. “Nature, here, is not treated as a resource, but as a complex milieu of interaction between humans and the other-than-human — one we must care for in order to keep it hospitable. This is what we learned from the Tunisian Sahara: a lesson we wish first to reveal through the map, and then to safeguard and strengthen through concrete actions emerging from work with the collectives who live there.”

Winners were selected by jury members Nora Akawi, Assistant Professor, The Cooper Union; Ifeoma Ebo, Founding Principal, Creative Urban Alchemy; Mark Gardner, Principal, Jaklitch / Gardner Architects; Kabage Karanja, Co-Founder, Cave_bureau; and Mphethi Morojele, Managing Director, 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.”