Co-Weave Fuwwah Lab

We now concluded the first phase of our Co-Weave Fuwwah Lab, which extended for three consecutive Saturdays from April 25 to May 9. This time we gathered at the Tekeya al-Khalwatiyah once again, owing to its spacious courtyard and shaded entryway. It is a rather beautiful building, with the typical mangur brick facade repeated inside at the entrance to the darih of Shaykh Rihan. The Khalwatiyah is a sufi order founded by Yahya Shirvani, a disciple of Umar al-Khalwati, in Herat (in what is today Afghanistan). The first part of the day was spent co-designing: by now acquainted with their buddy, designers and weavers sat together in the shaded sides of the courtyard. They used a design log we provided both to check that the co-design exercise was effectively engaging the weavers as much as the designers and to sum up the most important design elements. As couples were finalising their design outlines, we started a full revision of techniques, colours and sizes with Mahmoud Sa'ad '...

The theme of today was industrial heritage and contemporary crafts. We first stopped at the Tarbush Factory Gates (1824), which I reckon is the first factory in the whole SWANA region (check out this beautiful publication by DAIK member Ralph Bodenstein). If you want to see how tarbush is made today, one of the last workshops can be found in Mu'ataz Ladin Allah Street , Historic Cairo. We had a stop at the local club - generously offered by Mr Yasser Ragab, Chairman of al-Marwa Association Fuwwah - where we had a quick introduction to the concept of “tura”, the base unit used to weave patterns into carpets, offered by participant designer Mohamed aka Amro Magdy . A tour of some of the weaving workshops allowed us to meet the weavers in their environment, where the looms swing and clang for hours every day, and dyed threads hang to dry on balconies. We have no idea how many workshops there are in the city, but it feels like every large door in every building might have one, as pass...

On Saturday, April 25 we finally kicked off the first session of our Co-Weave Lab, and I must say that the day went really well! We left Cairo and headed north towards Tanta, just to steer westwards before reaching it, and headed to Damanhur, which in the days of Mehmet ‘Ali Pasha (1804-1849) was the regional capital. From Damanhur we followed the Mahmudiyah Canal (named after Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II), which links Alexandria to the Nile River. The Mahmudiyah made Fuwwah rich: built starting from 1817, the canal begins right in front of the city, allowing it to profit from the trade traffic between Cairo and the Mediterranean Sea. On our way there we distributed a personalised Pattern Book, containing a condensed documentation of some of the most striking patterns to be found in the heritage buildings of Fuwwah, on wood, on brick, and on stone. It was entirely created by our students of Interior and Graphics and Media, who photographed and traced the patterns, and then turned them int...