The Formation of Soon travels to this year’s edition of the Dubai Design Week opening on the 5th of November and will be on view through the 10th, at the Dubai Design District, in collaboration with the House or Artisans and Qasr Al Hosn.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
