Category Archives: Events

Fostering Cultural Collaboration: Carlos Guedes at DCT’s Expert Module

October 14, 2025Events, Newsxc2016

Last week, Carlos Guedes took part in the expert module “Cultural Heritage & Knowledge Development: Fostering a Culture of Integrated Protection,” organized by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi.

The four-day program brought together professionals from across the UAE and GCC to explore how culture, creativity, and heritage can intersect to shape sustainable development. Through a mix of seminars, workshops, and site-based exercises, participants engaged in hands-on exchanges on cultural policy, creative economies, and heritage protection.

Together with Khadija El Bennaoui, he co-led the session “Abu Dhabi Creative City and Its Cooperation with Other Cities.”

Formation of Soof at Dubai Design Week

November 4, 2024Events, News, UncategorizedSafeya Alblooshi

Members of the MaSC team Carlos Guedes, Amna Alnowais, Safeya Alblooshi, Waleed Madani and Juan Sierra, presented Formation of Soof at Dubai Design Week November 5-10, at the Dubai Design District, in collaboration with the House or Artisans and Qasr Al Hosn. This installation conceived together with Qasr Al Hosn/House of Artisans, was premiered last year at London Design Biennial as part of Abu Dhabi Pavilion and won the Biennial’s Theme award.

Formation of Soof installation - entrance

MaSC at the 3rd edition of the Maritime Heritage Festival

March 4, 2024Events, Field Work, NewsSafeya Alblooshi

MaSC continues to collaborate as partners with the Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT) for the third edition of the Abu Dhabi Maritime Heritage Festival. In this year’s edition, MaSC have recorded new repertoire including the Tohoraeb (kind of Nahma), and bahri songs, as well an in-depth interview with Mustafa Al Fardan, a pearl trader and the 6th generation of pearl traders in his family.

Formation of Soof at Expo City for Union Day

December 10, 2023Events, NewsSafeya Alblooshi

The Formation of Soof was displayed at Expo City as part of this year’s celebration of Union Day earlier this month. The work was presented in collaboration with the House of Artisans.

Formation of Soof at the London Design Biennale

June 1, 2023Events, News, UncategorizedSafeya Alblooshi

We are happy to announce that “The Formation of Soof” is currently being showcased at the London Design Biennale. The immersive installation pays tribute to the core materials and tools of the Al-Sadu craft which is the wool (Soof) & the spinner/ spindle (Maghzal or Ghazal).
Spinning the wool is a traditional technique used to create the raw wool into yarn balls, the process of spinning is one that is time consuming but also very intimate and hypnotic in it’s formation process; this experience celebrates the importance of the technique and the flow of the movement that allows for the transformation from a raw soft material into the Sadu textile that is architecturally fundamental to the building of traditional tent structures.
The experience utilises creative audio and visual videos as part of its interactive installation.
The Abu Dhabi Pavilion the “Formation Of Soof” is showing until June 25th in Somerset House at the Biennale site.

This work is in collaboration with Qasr Al Hosn, the House of Artisans, and NYUAD Outreach.

Formation of Soof installation postcards

Dialogues At Al Hosn – Music of Crafts panel talk

March 24, 2023Events, NewsSafeya Alblooshi

This Tuesday, members of the MaSC team spoke at the inaugural session of Dialogues At Al Hosn, a panel discussion with the curators and content developers of the Music of Crafts exhibition.

Thank you to Qasr Al Hosn for the fruitful collaboration and to NYUAD Community Outreach for opening the dialogue with us.

The Music of Crafts exhibition at Qasr Al Hosn

January 20, 2023Events, NewsSafeya Alblooshi

The Music of Crafts Exhibition came from a collaboration between Qasr Al Hosn, the House of Artisans, New York University Abu Dhabi, and the Music and Sound Cultures (MaSC) Research Group.

Music of Crafts exhibit – multichannel installation

The “Music of Crafts” exhibition is an audiovisual journey of the artisanal crafts of the United Arab Emirates – the talli, the sadu, and the khoos. Qasr Al Hosn’s collaboration with MaSC portrays the crafts from an audiovisual macroscopic lens, in which details are captured to draw the observers’ attention to the specificities of the gestures and the sounds related to each craft. Subtle video and audio processing enhance the setting providing a sophisticated immersive experience.

The videos and recordings created for this exhibition will be available to the public to download for free, allowing us to share Emirati handicraft culture, and the musical way it is interpreted.

The exhibit will be running on site in Qasr Al Hosn until March 2023 and the videos can be viewed in MaSC’s YouTube channel, along with binaural renderings of the talli and sadu crafts sound compositions made for the multichannel installation available on Soundcloud.

Safeya Alblooshi to present work at this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival

June 29, 2022Events, NewsSafeya Alblooshi, Soundscape, UAEcag204@nyu.edu

As part of this years featured programming at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, United Arab Emirates: Living Landscape | Living Memory, Safeya Alblooshi, MaSC’s research assistant, will present some of her field recordings from around the UAE as part of a sound installation at the National Mall in Washington DC. Working in a team of six and led by sound artist Diana Chester, the group created various soundscapes that tie to the theme of ‘Living Landscape, Living Memory’, with her work mainly focusing on Landscapes where she contributed to create multi-track soundscapes that were later spatialized and presented as sound narratives that portray the cultural, urban, and natural sonic environments of the UAE.