Roza was born in 1966 in Budapest, Romania. Lives and works in Budapest.
Trying to handle the situation of the catastrophe, us Syrian artist try to find new solutions for the moment of the new beginning. How will we rebuild the country? I dare not write the word: heal it. Millions of houses are damaged.
I try to map old and new techniques and find out incredible things about the old Beehive house of my grandmother. The inner temperature was usually twenty degrees lower then outdoors. No concrete or steel was needed, no bricks burned, no hard lava rocks. Steel is a problem is Syria, it is an import product, wood is also rare in the drier areas. The adobe bricks of the Beehive houses are completely sustainable, they just fall crumble and turn to mud when not in use. The round shape is a perfect form, the high dome is a cooler system trapping warm air in the top of the dome and keeping cool air in the ground where people sleep, which could not be bett er if the best computers tried to calculate. The temperature difference is 15 - 20 degrees between indoors an outdoors without air-condition. The form has remained the same for three or even ten thousand years. At this moment I do not know what will happen in Syria during the next months, how people will have the strength to rebuild it. I try to think in the smallest scale: the dome made of mud, the
Beehive and the one-room cube, or two rooms, with a framed photo of a relative and a maRress as all their sole belongings – our Syrian modernity, our pride. Anything more complex exceeds what my imagination can bear.
Roza el-Hassan, 2012
