The Formation of Soof installation, as part of the Abu Dhabi Pavilion at the London Design Biennale, is the winner of this year’s London Design Biennale Theme Medal!
The London Design Biennale jury chose three pavilions which demonstrated creativity and innovation in response to this year’s theme of ‘The Global Game — Remapping Collaborations’, and the Abu Dhabi pavilion was awarded for the most “inspiring interpretation of the theme.”
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.
The Music and Sound Cultures (MaSC) Group has released four short documentaries about the musical traditions of the Shihuh.
The MaSC team spent two days recording sounds of traditional crafts which include the Sadu, Talli, and Khoos weaving at the House of Artisans in Qasr Al Hosn, along with student volunteers Maitha Alriyami and Diana Donatella. The recordings will later be featured in an auditory installation experience at the Qasr Al Hosn next year.
Members of the MaSC team joined by collaborator and cinematographer Waleed Al Madani along with visiting scholar and filmmaker Amna Alnowais were in Ras Al Khaimah doing further recordings of the musical traditions of the Shihuh tribe as part of the project “Exploring the Musical Traditions of the Shihuh” (PI Carlos Guedes).
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.
New students join MaSC for the summer in the Post-Graduation Practical Training (PPTP) Program.
A few students from the class of 2022 recently joined MaSC to conduct research over the summer. Aaron Marcus-Willers (Music) , Enid Mollel (Music) , Gauri Kedia (Interactive Media and Visual Arts), and Prajjwal Bhattarai (Computer Science and Mathematics) will be workin on different projects as part of MaSC’s research agenda.
Aaron Marcus-Willers is mixing, improving, and decoding ambisonic recordings for MaSC’s ever-growing archive of taarab from Zanzibar and pearl diving music from Kuwait
Enid Mollel is working on the Volume III of the Eisenberg collection and in generating metadata for the Basalama collection of recordings of compositions by Zanzibari composer Ally Salim Basalama.
Gauri Kedia is designing the interface for the Virtual-Reality browser of MaSC’s digital compendium of music from the Western Indian Ocean
Prajjwal Bhattarai is working on the use of Transformers and deep learning in the generation of Carnatic-style rhythmic sequences.
You can check more about their profiles on the website’s people page!