In November 2024 Design Doha opened the exhibition Crafting Design Futures at the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) as part of the inaugural Design Doha Biennial, which brought together newly created works by makers (artists, designers, craftspeople) in Morocco (five makers) and Qatar (four makers). These works were the culmination of a year-long cross-cultural residency and exchange.
What connected the selected makers was a shared commitment to the crafts of their respective regions and to the resilience of craft at a moment when it is often spoken about as being in crisis, suffering losses of practices, practitioners and markets. The makers included in the residency and exhibition Crafting Design Futures all resist the categories and the minoritisation of craft within the broader contexts and value systems of art and design.
Weaving Resilience
Qatar-based artist and designer Majdulin Nasr Allah’s work Disorient(al) demonstrates how powerful narratives of resistance and resilience can be imagined through traditional craft practices such as weaving and needlework.
During her time at the residency programme in Morocco, Nasr Allah engaged with Beni Rugs, a rug-making studio located outside Marrakech, at the base of the Atlas Mountains. At Beni Nasr Allah witnessed the impact of the company’s dedication to the training, development and design leadership of a community of female weavers. She invited these weavers to create a collaborative rug, uniting the craft of female weavers with an image of resistance and resilience of her Palestinian culture. The outcome is Disorient(al): a traditional Moroccan rug with a design by Nasr Allah.
Approaching the large-scale Disorient(al) the viewer is struck by the hard-edge white and grey lines that make up the foreground of the rug design. These lines, upon closer viewing, are evidently the checkpoints, watchtowers and modes of architecture of control forced onto the lands of Palestine to restrict and oppress its people. Nasr Allah draws the viewer into her design through these lines of control. As one gets closer to the rug and image, the more subdued colours and biomorphic forms of the background and edges of the rug become more evident. And one begins to understand that the richness of the narrative in fact lies in the vegetal motifs, which represent the olive and orange groves, the green of the land and the fertility of the natural world of Palestine. Ultimately Nasr Allah’s collaborative work takes the form of traditional Moroccan rugs to weave an image of the hope for resistance against the unimaginable oppression and cruelty experienced by the people and lands of Palestine.
Another maker who engaged with traditional Moroccan rug practices is Morocco-based artist Amine El Gotaibi. For El Gotaibi the wool and the lives and narratives of weavers are often core to his practice. During the residency he researched the history of education at the building that now houses Liwan Design Studios and Labs. Liwan is on the site of the first school for girls and women in Doha. El Gotaibi began to unpack these histories through his material approaches to earthen, adobe architecture and traditional weaving materials; in the process he created two new works.
In the MIA galleries his piece Saboura includes an exact replica of one of the blackboards (saboura) used in the education of girls and women at the school. El Gotaibi used the character that renders words in Arabic as female on this board, out of which tonnes of Moroccan wool, as traditionally used in rugs, emerged and created a path across the gallery. For El Gotaibi, in his work, each strand of wool holds the narrative of a weaver and, in this case, also became symbolic of the resilience and hope woven through history as a result of the education of women.
These themes carried through to his second work, Al Dohayiat, a site-specific piece in the MIA Park, where El Gotaibi created a sculpture that reflects on female education and power, utilising the Indigenous adobe-building technique of Morocco and the region. This material is inherently resilient: it is responsive to climate change, to the land and people local to its site, and the very earth it sits on. As such it embodies narratives of resilience and the potential to craft a future through engagement with the local, the Indigenous and the power of craft.
Collaboration as a Mode of Resilience
Trees are among the longest living organisms on the planet, so wood itself can be a symbol of resilience in the face of many global crises. The makers Hamza Kadiri (Morocco-based) and Abdulrahman Al Muftah (Qatar-based) engaged with wood for the works they created.
Kadiri typically creates highly finished, functional room-scale design objects. Through the experience of visiting Qatari museum collections, studios and exhibitions in Doha, Kadiri chose to create a conceptual, sculptural piece of wood and brass. His work Resilience in Destruction embodies the suffering of individual people across the region today. At the same time brass is a symbol of strength and hope in the face of destruction. The piece was displayed in front of the Damascus Room in the MIA’s collection, itself symbolic of resilience.
Kadiri and his Casablanca-based studio collaborated with the designer Abdulrahman Al Muftah to create Al Muftah’s Tornado Shelves. This work captures the winds and motion of sand across the deserts of Qatar, and the energy embodied within this dance of the sands. Al Muftah collaborated with Kadiri to capture the ephemerality of the desert winds and movements into wood, rendering these elements resilient to their ever-changing conditions.
Harnessing Resilience
Qatar-based Reema Abu Hassan was struck by how the earth of Morocco was often the essential material and subject in the work of many makers she met across the country. Upon returning to Qatar she was determined to move away from imported clay in search of local Qatari clay. Through her practice-based research she was able to create her work, Zelige Library, with the clay of Qatar. Zelige Library is an homage to the libraries and displays of Moroccan zelige tiles she witnessed in mosques, decorative interventions, academies and studios during her time in Morocco. Abu Hassan used the zelige vocabulary to create ceramic vessel forms, which she then placed on a desert-like landscape in the gallery context.
One of the studios Abu Hassan’s project references is that of the Moroccan designer Bouchra Boudoua. Boudoua has long used the clay of Morocco to create interior, utilitarian objects. For Crafting Design Futures Boudoua challenged herself to move her practice beyond the everyday, the functional and the decorative, instead seeking to create sculptural, room-scale forms. Boudoua also pushed herself to work with the unglazed clay of Morocco. The result is Totem, a collection of three totemic forms that tower over visitors in the galleries. The unglazed surfaces of the sculptural totems subtly embody the resilience of the Amazigh Indigenous modes of making and ways of knowing.
Similarly, inspired by her engagement with the land and indigenous materials, the Qatar-based designer Nada Elkharashi was interested in the potential of natural forms in Qatar, specifically rock, to harness resilience in the face of climate crises, such as water scarcity. The work 66km is the result of Elkharashi’s interest; it is a speculative design object that questions whether one could look to the rocks of Qatar as a mode of resilience in the face of water shortages.
Reinvention as Resilience
While in Morocco the designers from Qatar heard from Professor Imane Benkirane, whose work is dedicated to integrating craft and architecture to create sustainable solutions for artisans, cities and communities. During her talk Benkirane spoke of the power of resilience when contemporary makers work with contemporary craftspeople to create new expressions and forms. Benkirane sees these collaborations as having the potential to resolve the crisis many artisans’ livelihoods and craft traditions are facing.
Sara Ouhaddou (France- and Morocco-based) is a maker whose practice is built upon years, often decades, of collaborations with particular craftspeople and communities. One such project, Arrous Anzar, started from a visit to MIA over a decade ago. During this visit Ouhaddou was fascinated by the Egyptian, Iranian and Syrian glasswork of the eighth to 12th centuries in the MIA’s collection. She began to ask why there were no traditional glass crafts in Morocco, until she unpacked the history enough to understand that there had been a very short-lived tradition.
Since then Ouhaddou has dedicated herself to working with masters of Islamic blown and cut glass at CIRVA in Marseilles, to create contemporary approaches to these traditional and ancient glass forms of the region. She is now working to train artisans of Morocco in the tradition of glass. Through this collaboration Ouhaddou’s work is reintroducing glass as a craft to Morocco and she is modeling modes of craft resilience for the 21st century. In the exhibition Crafting Design Futures Ouhaddou’s glass pieces were placed together with those of the region in the MIA’s collection to complete the circle of the narrative and to demonstrate how a museum collection can stand in resilient solidarity in the region, as well as how it can inspire future makers, works and research to reinvigorate the next generations of craft.
The works of Morocco-based Amine Asselman similarly balances the technologically novel 3D printing with the most ancient of craft traditions, some of Morocco’s oldest extant kilns for the firing of ceramics. For Crafting Design Futures Asselman created a new room-scale, abstract ceramic installation. For this work, Crystalline, Asselman shipped 20,000 ‘identical’ ceramic forms based on the vocabulary of the zelige tile, rendered in three dimensions. Each form was created from pouring clay into a 3D mould, and the forms were then fired in one of the oldest kilns in Tétouan, Morocco.
The resulting Crystalline was an installation that at once evoked an ancient Moroccan medina and imaged a digitally rendered cityscape of the future. In his process and the creation of this new installation, Asselman brought to life the resilience of craft and Indigenous knowledge, including ancient materials, practices and techniques of making, as well as forms and languages – even in the face of digital techniques, knowledge and modes of seeing the world.
When the designers visited the Marrakech studio of designer Younes Duret, he encouraged the designers of Qatar, through the residency, to question and probe design legacies and teachings that privilege Western models and design ‘heroes’ as the canon of knowledge. In place of such culturally imperialistic notions of design and design histories, he encouraged them to look to resilient practices of making Indigenous to the region as their canons of knowledge, such as craft and artisanal practices, are both contemporary and ancient.
In his 2013 publication The Invention of Craft, Glenn Adamson, artistic director of Design Doha, argues that at the time of the Industrial Revolution craft was strategically othered and devalued to prioritise and value modern fine arts and sculpture.1 Never is this more apparent and its legacies more palpable than in the postcolonial contexts across the Global South and the MENA region. Many of the practices presented here and in the exhibition Crafting Design Futures intentionally push back against the devaluing of craft practices, communities, makers and modes of knowledge to offer pathways to resilience for makers, narratives and practices across the region.
