The Crafts District
Curated by Arini, and extracting from innovative labs and workshops conducted by Amman Design Week and its collaborators in 2018 and 2019, ‘Min Ila’ is a showcase that highlights the diversity and importance of material and its manipulation in the realm of crafts and making.
From ceramics to woodwork, textiles to translucent concrete and stone, and bacteria to mattress stuffing, the exhibition showcases a variety of materials that have inspired designers to reinvent the traditional into new application, whether it be furniture, fashion, product, or lighting design.
With work created at the intersection between science and design, the exhibition showcases the result of two projects conducted by Amman Design Week; the first being the ‘Textile Innovation Lab I: Material Innovation’, a workshop conducted by Annette Fauvel and co-run with the Goethe Institute in Amman, and the second being the ‘Innovative Crafts Lab’ run in collaboration with Creacities and under the guidance of Samer Yamani. Both workshops encouraged experimentation with new techniques and processes to bend the use of local material and come up with new forms. The materials experimented with over this year include glass, clay, paper, kombucha, and bioplastics.
The exhibition kick-starts a project as a collaboration between Arini and Amman Design Week to begin working on a material library that can be accessed by designers as a research tool to continue to innovate.
Header Image: Made from Jordan, 2019 - Twelve Degrees