The Crafts District
Arini to Curate the Crafts District 2019
Tucked away in a hidden corner of Jabal Amman, the Kabariti Village is a private property owned by the Kabariti Family. It is a compound of old residential buildings, heritage homes, and gardens located off of Omar Bin Al Khattab Street and built in the 1930s.
Sparsely visited by the public since its renovation in 2011, and unoccupied since 2008, the Kabariti Village will be open to the public during Amman Design Week 2019, where it will host the Crafts District exhibitions and showcases, thanks to a generous donation by the Kabariti family.
Taking place in a new location each year, the Crafts District is a pop-up experience that combines design installations, exhibitions, shops, and cultural programs that offer artisans, designers, craftspeople, and makers from across the country a chance to engage with audiences in conversations around cultural heritage and how it links to contemporary culture.
This third edition of the Crafts District continues in a tradition of Amman Design Week creating instances of public interventions in abandoned or underutilized spaces in the city. The first edition took place in 2016 at the Raghadan Tourist Terminal in downtown Amman, which saw the revitalization of the abandoned bus station in to a hub for creativity, performance, and craft.
This years intervention hopes to bring crafts back to the street level and on-street engagement with audiences in a significant neighborhood in Amman. Running alongside “Anki’s” laundromat and Jacaranda Images gallery, as well as in the homes in the site, the Crafts District looks at materials and the process of making in the public realm and as part of a narrative about production and consumption in the contemporary world.
The Crafts District