Building on our experience during the Yalla Fuwwah! event on August 15, 2025 (part of the Cross-Craft Project), we want to further engage local craftspeople and experiment with co-design. Before Yalla Fuwwah! we discovered that local kilim makers, while being very skilled in the art of carpet weaving, lack visual identity, and source their designs freely from the Internet. There is little in terms of local traditional pattern. In August 2025 we thought of proposing three different designs based on the rich heritage of the city and asked local craftsman Mahmoud Sa'ad 'Abed to execute them, negotiating with him the overall look of the carpet and the size. The three kilims were exhibited in the Rabaa al-Khattabiyah historic building and at the Cairo Design Week (Heliopolis), along with an illustration of the motives and the design process.
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...
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