Inside the darkened hall of an old vegetable market in Sharjah this spring was a domed wooden structure: a scaled-down replica of the US Capitol building, turned instead into a wire-mesh chicken coop. The artist collective and ‘progressive academy’, founded in 2016 by artist Nida Sinnokrot and architect Sahar Qawasmi, might have contributed quite an iconic sculpture for their participation in the Sharjah Biennial, but their work, based in the hills outside Ramallah, is more focused on how the functional and quotidian can work through any claims to power. The group’s activities, at their site in the village of Ein Qiniya, have entailed several years of rewilding the landscape and renovating the historical buildings there, including a twelfth-century shrine, alongside residencies, summer schools, regular workshops on olive field management, film screenings and discussion events, exhibitions and public art interventions. While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has limited visits by international collaborators, which in the past have included the likes of Cooking Sections, the group continues its model of grassroots organisation as art.