The atmosphere was one of serenity and peace, unlike any I had known for an academic setting
Joud Shawwa, M.Arch candidate
Fornelli, Asinara – photo courtesy of MLA candidate Angela Zhang
For three weeks in May, a group of SALA MArch and MLA students traveled with UBC Assistant Professor Sara Jacobs to the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, embarking on one of the annual Study Abroad courses offered by SALA. Among these students were Angela Zhang and Joud Shawwa, students in their final year of the MLA and MArch programs respectively. After a dense and demanding winter semester, they traded screens and books in favour of immersive, land-based learning at a slower pace, and shared their experience with us.
Sardinia’s archaeology and landscapes reflect distinct material, agricultural, and shepherding traditions, despite a long and contested history of occupation on the Island. Human presence on the island dates as far as 18, 000 B.C. It has been occupied and passed through by the likes of the Phoenicians, Punics, Romans, Etruscans, and most notably the Nuragic civilization which formed in the Bronze Age, named for the Nuraghe; thousands of stone towers built high in stature and number, considered a feat of engineering, and iconic of Sardinia’s Bronze Age. Despite this, historian Jeff Biggers has described the island’s history and archaeological artifacts as being in “constant recovery.” Beyond being simply ignored, there have been times, historically, when Sardinia’s cultural autonomy has been actively threatened.
Linguists have noted approximately 75 dialects among the four or five variants of the Sardinian language. In 1848, Italian government officials sought to homogenize Sardinia by eradicating these native dialects. There is a strong tradition of oration, poetry, and singing in Sardinia which is tied to the local landscape. The sheer rootedness of these practices allowed Sardinian culture to resist pressure to be erased. This notion of pastoral practices influencing narrative style, rhythm, and meter dates to the Bronze Age and still today is carried by the island’s shepherds. Land-based practices in Sardinia are ancient and generative – the act of tending to land and flocks both produced and inspired oratory and poetic culture, which itself is as place-specific as the craftsmanship of textile practices. There is thus a long history of cyclical creative process here which generates culture through personal practice.
Sardinian locals – photo courtesy of MLA candidate Hannah Whitlaw
These traditions and methods of being within the land renders Sardinia a fitting setting for Jacobs’ Study Abroad course, thousands of years after the establishment of its civilization and land-based culture.
Sara: I am interested in temporal, or progress-based, approaches to design and how the movement of things like plants, rocks, water, and soil become ways to understand contested landscapes. A major focus of the course was time: How can temporal change be read through social and ecological spaces? How has a place’s specific ecological and geological conditions shaped land-based practices? Sardinia is a bit of a microcosm for these questions, whether it is how mining and extraction have remade the landscape, or learning to read the landscape as a contested space of occupation, or how traditional shepherding and agricultural practices are changing due to climate and economic shifts. This was also a chance to learn while being in-place through direct experience, in a really beautiful, special landscape!
The students began by learning about the place.
Angela: We started our days with a cappuccino and ended with a digestivo liquor paired with specialty Sardinian cheese. In between, we walked through replanted pine forests, visited museums, explored abandoned mining towns, swam, descended into grottos, and ascended onto mountain peaks.
Student outing – photo courtesy of MLA candidate Angela Zhang
These educational outings were preceded by a pre-departure research exercise undertaken by the students in order to provide context for the places they would be visiting first-hand.
Angela: Themes included the island’s environmental history, evolving craftsmanship, agro-pastoral past and present, foodways, and military presence. Throughout our time spent in different parts of Sardinia, it became evident that these are not siloed categorizations of cultural history, but dynamically intertwined systems that are continuously shifting.
Joud: We spent the first several days familiarizing ourselves with the landscape, learning why replanted cypresses lined the hills in organized rows, what the geology says about land-use, and how landscapes have been altered under occupation.
In national parks, the mountains, meadows, and natural areas, there are remnants of architectures of occupation, evidence of an altered landscape. Something really meaningful about this Study Abroad was learning to read a landscape through time, and understanding how the natural landscape is a living record of what happened to the land. The more time I spent in Sardinia, the more I felt its unique cultural and geographic identity—influences from past empires, occupations, and geographic proximity to North Africa.
The learning phase location itinerary included Alghero, a northwestern coastal city where students visited the Porto Cone Natural Park, and notably Asinara Island in the Sassari province of Sardinia. The island was known and used by the Greeks, Phoenecians, and Romans. Today, its official population is 1. It is only accessible by ferry from Stintino or Porto Torres, both small coastal communities in northern Sardinia. Asinara Island was a particularly potent case study in the impact of geopolitics, occupation, and control on the physicality of a landscape, and made an impression on many of the students.
Angela: As we stepped off the small, chartered ferry into Fornelli, an old prison base camp, we were greeted with a startling landscape of deeply saturated yellows and oranges, where a species of euphorbia has established itself generously. The island’s strategic location informed the state’s decision to transform it into a prison in the late nineteenth century, driving out the island’s residents to mainland Sardinia where they founded the commune of Stintino.
Former Limestone Quarry – photo courtesy of MLA candidate Angela Zhang
Asinara is a deeply complex and layered landscape. Penal colony ruins from WWI materialize in between junipers and Mediterranean scrub, alongside derelict quarantine stations and a mass grave for Austro-Hungarian soldiers that perished on this island. Somewhat paradoxically, because of its rigorous isolation under the state, the island’s biodiversity was preserved throughout the tumultuous twentieth century. Even so, the ecological makeup of the island was fundamentally altered, particularly when animals and livestock were introduced, such as goats – they really do eat everything! Everything except euphorbia, as it is toxic to them. The brilliant sea of flames that first enamoured us is not as natural as it seems, but results from decades, if not centuries, of geopolitical conflict and environmental impact.
The second half of the Study Abroad curriculum emphasized the exploration and understanding of how one comes to know a place. The term project was a Personal Practice manifested through making, drawing, installation, and craft in a wide breadth of mediums, had loose parameters, but needed to be a response to a student’s individual experience of place, land, landscape. For both Joud and Angela, it was precisely this emphasis on process, which sparked their interest and desire to participate.
Washing local wool – photo courtesy of MLA candidate Hannah Whitlaw
Angela: Sardinia, itself already a fascinating place, seemed particularly conducive to such hands-on learning due to its unique geomorphic and cultural history.
For Joud, the question of how one comes to know a place was captivating.
Joud: As a Palestinian, a lot of my practice is rooted in the conditions of homeland and how you come to know a place. My own homeland is one I have never been to, yet have come to know through engaging and learning music, traditional foods, art forms such as embroidery, and through the stories I grew up with—all contributing to a collective memory of place.
It was in Semèstene, an inland municipality in the Province of Sassari where the Personal Practice of each student took on life. Somewhat of a precedent was set by the students’ generous hosts, Jean, Anto, Irene, Tori, and Gianluca.
Excerpt from Angela’s sketchbook – courtesy of MLA candidate Angela Zhang
Angela: Jean, who Sara knows from the University of Washington, and Anto hosted us in Semèstene, sharing not only their physical homes with us, but their uniquely situated community as well. Both of them are spatial practitioners in design, and Foghiles is their ongoing project together.
Irene is a friend and fellow collaborator of Jean and Anto, who recently completed her Master’s thesis on Sardinian practices of sheep shearing. During our stay together, she helped to guide our personal practices, shared sheep and weaving knowledge, and accompanied us on outings.
Our stay was also joined by Gianluca and Tori. Their project, Alzu, explores the intersection of food, culture, tradition, and community. Through these avenues, they prepared delicious meals, taught a culurgiones (a type of Sardinian pasta) workshop, and shared stories of local food knowledge and practices.
The hosts shared their ways of stewarding and being within the land, offering expertise to assist the students with their own Personal Practice. For Angela, it was about forging relationships to people, stories, land. Joud chose weaving as her primary medium, and used Sardinian wool.
Joud: I took a loom with me on the land, to the beach, in the courtyard of our residence, and wove the story of our time in Sardinia as it happened day by day. I was interested in learning an artform that is so pertinent to Sardinian culture, to observe through creating, and to draw similarities between textile patterning and landscape practices across the Mediterranean basin. What started as an attempt to learn to weave with Sardinian sheep’s wool became a story of our time in Sardinia. A map of experiences and all the places landscape is found in.
Excerpt of Joud’s Personal Practice – courtesy of M.Arch candidate Joud Shawwa
The foundational principle of this course was somewhat atypical in the traditional curriculum of a design course, which is often results-driven. Typically, students will spend a semester working towards their proposed solution to some kind of problem, manifested as a set of static drawings and diagrams. Removing emphasis from the end result had tangible impacts not only on the quality of the students’ learning, but on the depth of their connection to and understanding of the subject matter.
Angela: Throughout this process, we were all invested to see where our personal practice took us. We discovered or uncovered something new about the landscapes around us, while simultaneously attuning to an inner landscape that demands an equal presence.
We discovered or uncovered something new about the landscapes around us, while simultaneously attuning to an inner landscape that demands an equal presence.
Angela Zhang, MLA candidate
Joud: The atmosphere was one of serenity and peace, unlike any I had known for an academic setting. After a challenging and dense semester, I thoroughly appreciated the opportunity to spend time on the land, and to pursue a personal practice that did not involve digital means. The framing of the project as something habitual and regularly practiced alleviated the pressure of creating something complete, and allowed for creativity in how to express ideas about the land and what it means to know a place. Everybody was so in tune with their own practice, and found something to immerse themselves in for the remainder of the course.
Sara’s Sardinia trip challenged its participants to reexamine how they come to understand a place, improving their literacy in reading history through its inconspicuous imprints on a landscape. It is clear that this literacy is most effectively, and most enjoyably developed through immersion and repetition, through acts, rather than the passive intake of information from a remote location. Perhaps it is solely the bodily engagement to land, the repetitive inquiry and curiosity of an ongoing practice, which can render experience, memory, and lessons learnt as saturated in one’s mind as the relentless heat of the Mediterranean sun.
Edge of Sardinia – photo courtesy of MLA candidate Angela Zhang
Student work from the 2025 Sardinian and Scandinavian Study Abroads will be showcased in an exhibition hosted in SALA’s Lasserre building later this month, with an opening reception taking place September 25, 2025. Student projects can also be found in detail on our Student Work page.