1971 Design Space presents 'Once Upon Design: New Routes for Arabian Heritage’ curated by Noor Aldabbagh, founder of Banafsajeel, an award-winning curatorial platform focused on artists and designers in the Gulf.
1971 Design Space presents 'Once Upon Design: New Routes for Arabian Heritage' curated by Noor Aldabbagh, founder of Banafsajeel, an award-winning curatorial platform focused on artists and designers in the Gulf.
This exhibit will be held in the atrium of Building 6 in d3 throughout the upcoming design week. The exhibit features six design installations resulting from a collaboration of Gulf-based architects, product designers and graphic designers who experimented with elements of heritage from the Arabian Peninsula, focusing on customs and oral traditions inherited through generations that are implicitly linked to spaces.
Ancient to modern heritage is celebrated, from the pure ceramic form brought to the region 3000 years ago, to the pre-renovation Abu Dhabi Corniche of the 1990s. An incense burner is re-imagined for the region today and a Majlis is deconstructed around a symbolic bonfire. Palmscapes recalls a pilgrim’s transfer of date seeds from the Prophet’s home in Medina to her home country to use them as prayer beads, inadvertently producing the most delicious ‘dates of light’ in North Africa today. A traditional Samry song that describes the journey to an unattainable love in the south of Arabia is remixed by a director who brings millions of people together on his Youtube channel today.
MAJLISNA
Created by architect Reem Hantoush and product designer Ayah Al Bitar, the deconstructed Majlis encloses a number of seats within a circular enclosure of columns which brings people face to face, with equal distance between one another. This enables an interaction to unfold where, unlike typical Majlis settings, no implied hierarchical differences exist in seating arrangements, based on centrality of seating position or proximity to the exit. The alteration in Majlis shape enhances its role as a social space of coming together, and evokes the primordial act of gathering around the focal point of a campfire. The space is intended as a capsule for creating memories and sharing in conversation or storytelling.
CHASING LIGHT
Architect Talin Hazbar and designer Latifa Saeed collaborated with a 40-year-old terracotta factory in Sharjah to create an installation that makes a direct reference to craft making in the region. In Chasing Light, repetitiveness in shapes implies continuity and growth, set against a backdrop of the exhibition wall. The work therefore honors and praises the pure and primitive form in which terracotta takes shape through the handling of crafts people, while simultaneously propelling it into a frame of contemporary exhibition. The project involved working with throwing wheels and firing on kiln; a technique that evolved from the earliest pottery practice of open pit firing, evidenced in the Arabian Peninsula since the Iron Age.
NADD
The installation by Dubai-based LOCI architectural and design studio lays out their own route of research and experimentation towards re-imagining the traditional incense burner for the region today. In Arabic, Nadd is the name of a plant with that emits a healing fragrance when burned as incense or bukhoor. Bukhoor was popular for sanctifying religious ceremonies since the 8th Century BCE when the incense route flourished along the arid regions of Southern Arabia. Today, the ubiquitous tradition of burning Bukhoor continues to carry special significance in customs of hospitality within a culture that places emphasis on scent.
Wood and glass were chosen for their heat properties and natural feel for the reinvented form of the vertical burner. Parametrical geometric patterns on the top of the incense burner allow more smoke to evaporate from the central area where it is needed. Overall, the product’s minimal form maximizes functionality and is intended to fit into contemporary style homes in the region.
PALMSCAPES
An immersive lighting and sound installation by COdESIGN features six vertical palm trunk structures within a dark room. Stacked with wooden plates, the length of each column alternates natural and manufactured forms, with the carved wood at the top projecting organic shaped shadows onto the ceiling. The columns are embedded with speakers and positioned within two triangular islands placed side by side. This creates a soundscape that incorporates echoes of walking in a palm farm, the distant call to prayer, and a woman’s mumbling of supplications. The work embodies an iconic source of sustenance in the Arabian Peninsula and implies several routes of travel through its landscapes, from India to North Africa. This installation is inspired by a story about an old lady who visited the home of Aishah, the Prophet’s wife, in Al Madina Al Munawwarah. There she spotted date stones on the ground and gathered them promptly, amazed at finding descendants of fruit eaten by the Prophet himself. She strung them into prayer beads that she took back home to North Africa. Filled with piety from her recent journey and looking to learn the ways of God, she was mocked by the learned men in her city as a poor old lady unworthy of their teaching. She continued to regularly pray outside the mosque for years, until she passed away. As she was being carried to her funeral, her prayer beads dropped to the ground. No one bothered to pick the valueless date stones. Seven years later, palm trees grew in the same spot, sprouting the most delicious dates in North Africa until today.
PLACES WE USED TO GO
Diana Hawatmeh, co-founder of Abjad Design, graphic posters depict public locations where her own family traditions took place in the 1980s, using a subjective lens of her memories while growing up in the UAE. The posters challenge the rigid rules of Arabic type through a childlike and inconsistent style. The modern locations depicted in the posters include the pre-renovation Abu Dhabi corniche, Al Musafah industrial area in Abu Dhabi, and three Dubai weekend destinations that were popular with expat families: the British Club, Leisureland, and the first modern shopping mall in the UAE, Al Ghurair mall. Almost all of these locations either no longer exist or have drastically changed since the 1980’s. Individual accounts of Hawatmeh’s family traditions are written on the backs of the posters, revealing Diana’s personal memories within these public spaces, from rollerblading by the corniche and playing by the famous Volcano fountain, to screen printing in her father’s factory. These brief stories employ a colloquial dialect that represents Hawatmeh’s unique Jordanian oral heritage, carried over to the Gulf through her family.
COURTYARD CULTURE
In this outdoor interactive installation, Studio Mieke Meijer, a collaboration between Mieke Meijer and Roy Letterlé based in Eindhoven, Netherlands re-scales and re-imagines the architectural structure of the traditional courtyard. Historically, this structure was brought over from neighboring regions such as India and Iran through traders who settled in the Gulf over a century ago. Quite different from the common Areesh homes made from palm tree fronds, courtyards offered a central outdoor space where people could socialize while retaining privacy from the outside world. A characteristic feature of this structure was the flexibility of the uses of the different spaces within it; for example, families would sleep on the roofs during the summer.
Courtyard Culture remains true to the traditional courtyard’s social and flexible characteristics. The lower level is re-purposed to cultivate plants, protected from this region’s harsh sunlight with partial coverage. By situating this work in the balcony of 1971 Design space in Sharjah, it remains in relationship with the surrounding landscape. Visitors are invited to sit and take in a view of the old boats, recalling the commercial and cultural exchanges that made and continue to make the coastal cities of the Gulf the places they are today.