Safa is a Beirut - London based architect, composer and researcher. He was a fellow at Ashkal Alwan HWP program in 2018 and a graduate from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University in 2019. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in International Law at Westminster University where he investigates the acoustics of armed conflict and its intersection with collateral damage.

 

He was part of multiple publications and music compilations, having shown individual and collaborative artwork and performances at Goethe Institute, Arab Center for Architecture, Ashkal Alwan in Beirut, the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, Sharjah Architecture Triennial among others.

 

His work revolves around the critique of contemporary spatiality and its sonic ramifications within environments of armed conflict and political violence. By attending to architectural tectonics and its logistical organisation, Safa proceeded to unearth the auditory makeup of physical space through a meticulous and multi-scalar study of spatial detail.

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Safa's thesis delineates the material conditions where the audibility of aerial bombardment during the 2006 war on Lebanon is comprised within the collateral effects of warfare. By elucidating the psychopathological and affective byproducts of extreme acoustic events on its listeners, he negotiates the legal potentials and failures to encompass it in the three gravitational principles of proportionality, distinction and military necessity within the laws of international and non-international armed conflicts.