CULTURE OF MAKING
2020-
Collaborations: AFAC (Arab Cultural Fund), Delfina Foundation
Locations: Syria, Egypt, Morocco
IWLab Team: Wesam Al Asali, Iyas Shahin, Ahmad Salah, Marah Sharabati, Rose Break, Joelle Deeb
"Cultures of Making" is an experimental project that uses creative writing and visual narratives to examine craft and environmental practices in the Arab region. The project addresses 20 practices in Syria, Egypt, and Morocco, focusing on their social and ecological contexts and their implications for contemporary design. It aims to challenge the centralized notion of architectural and design thinking by highlighting self-design mechanisms rooted in overlooked local contexts in urban, rural, and informal settings.
Cultures of Making aims to challenge three concepts in design and architecture: sustainability, planning, and globality. Sustainability is explored through heritage-based approaches to sustainability, craftsmanship, and livelihood, while planning is critiqued through participatory mechanisms involving artists, architects, designers, and local communities. Globality is also highlighted, emphasizing knowledge exchange among different cultures.
URGENT SUSTENANCE
2023
Location : Site #3, Bhar Lazrag, Tunis
IWLab Team:
Ahmad Salah | Joelle Deeb | Manaf Sharaf | Marah Sharabati | Rose Break
Today, There Are Two Searches For Our Sustenance, One In Geography And One In History. We Are Looking For Materials To Process, Cook, Sell And Buy. We Are Also Looking For Inherent Knowledge That We Reproduce: The Recipe Of A Previous Generation, Their Food Production And Processing Methods, And Their Alternatives That Do Not Know Electricity. In The Calamity (Our Calamity), The Past Becomes A Need For Survival, Not A Luxury For Identity, And The Memory Becomes A Resistance Front, Not A Refuge For Nostalgia. In Three Vocabularies From Syria, I Explain Old-New Making Habits Related To Food And Its Crafts, From The Preparation Of Qamar Al-Din To The Crafts Of Making Mud Ovens (Tanners) And Mobile Vendor Carts. I Establish These Making Habits In The Architecture And Urbanization Of Cities And Their Countryside. I Follow Their Heroes Step By Step In Their Work, And Together We Laugh At The Patent Culture That Intentionally Draws Boundaries Between Knowledge And Its Communities. Urgent Sustenance Is Part Of A Textual-Visual Collection On Making Cultures In The Arab Regio
2022
The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation
During his residency at Delfina Foundation, as part of The Politics of Food programme (autumn 2022), Wesam investigated how domestic architecture in Syria was transformed into machines for food production, processing, and storing during the last ten years of the war’s severe scarcity of resources and energy. When freezers were shut down and food became expensive, many old food preservation habits became valuable again. The project will rely on oral and visual history to unpack these habits and show the impact of food crises on the notion of dwelling in different geographies in Syria.
