9th March & 10th March 2022, 9 AM – 12 PM
Room 255
Upon Registration Only

In his 1999 book The Sun, the Genome and the Internet, British polymath Freeman Dyson proposed a genetically altered forest to speed up rapid carbon capture. While some found it disturbing, many others considered Dyson’s proposal as an attractive solution for excessive CO2 emissions. Pinar Yoldas will conduct a workshop on Dark Botany, a speculative multimedia installation with elements of bio-art that imagines Dyson’s altered forest is possible with a compound called dark chlorophyll. The workshop is essentially a Speculative Ecology workshop decorated with examples from the history of art and science. Participants will be able to learn how to conduct artistic research, organize ideas, use imagination and execute proposals using design tools.

Participants are required to bring their own laptops and drawing tools.

This event is an in-person event for the VCUarts Qatar community only. Please use the registration button to register.

Mashaq results from an ongoing research project, “The Type Platform – منصة الحروف”, studying the evolution of Arabic letterforms through their history of existence under the influences of changing technologies.

(Mashaq – مَشَقَ) in the heritage of Arabic calligraphy is the visual manifesto the master calligrapher passes on to his students, who follow his path in mastering precision when illustrating the letterforms.

The text was first conceived during 2020, when the world witnessed a global introduction into the concept “Home Office” and where the spaces of learning and working started to perforate the domestic. And so the text came as a response to imagine the future possibilities of creating hybrid spaces, shared with others, that allow for this model to work. On the other hand, it’s a satirical take on the current business model of mainstream “Co-working Spaces”. Which is why the text begins by asking the reader to discard the image that they recall when they read those words altogether and start anew as we create this speculative space in mind.

Co-working on Co-working is an open-source mode of thinking about working-learning-living possibilities whose ethos can be borrowed, adapted and implemented anywhere and everywhere, whether on the ground or on the web.

Maybe when the co-workings co-work,
They could network
To make their knowledge accessible,
To offer different makeups and setups,
Constantly propose and invent new ways of co-working.
Co-working that perforates living,
And living that perforates co-working.
To dedicate time for living,
To dedicate time for working,
To dedicate time for not working.

• Editor: Mai El Wakil
• English copy editor: Jenifer Evans
• Arabic copy editor: Aya Ehab
• Translation (English to Arabic): Hussein El-Hajj, Soheir Ragab El-Sharqawy, Ahmed Fathy Ismail
• Interlocutors: Sherifa Hamid and Ahmed Morsi (Dataland)
• Graphic Design: Youssef Salah and Engy Mohsen
• Drawing by: Omar Kassab

The initial objective was to create proposals out of food waste to create new materials to replace plastic packaging for food. However, it evolved into a Do-It-Yourself open-source material archive where people could start to experiment with these materials from home, know the simplicity of the process and further pressurize industries to move towards more sustainable solutions “because now the people know”.

Having been part of the MENA Grad Show, I was exposed to all kinds of people, including children and teenagers, which was eye-opening to a new direction for the project. I’ve had professors and teachers who were interested in workshops for their students, and little kids seemed to be intrigued by the video recipes and colorfulness of the project.

This made me open a new potential way for the project, and it is to potentially focus my target audience on schools and families, who could start working together on these materials, experimenting, learning about the potential of waste to replace one use or short-term items etc.

This project aims to educate on the simplicity of up-cycling a daily wasted resource, “food waste” to useful materials that would potentially be adopted by industries to move away from plastic Packaging. The prototype is fully functional and is ready to be launched.

The aim of this project is to allow individuals to utilize their tactile senses to bridge the gap between them and their surroundings through creating accessible points within supermarkets. Tactile icons were created to represent information which would otherwise have to be seen visually. By presenting alternative representations for visual information, enable aids individuals in having a more individualistic and independent experience within an inclusive supermarket environment.

Thus, this project falls under The State of Change to present a new method of inclusion as well as a unified language which can be identified by a larger majority of individuals, regardless of their differences. It allows people to stop and think from others’ perspectives and realize that seemingly mundane daily practices are a privilege to some.

The project focuses on visualizing folk songs of two different Egyptian environments; agricultural and coastal through Arabic lettering designs. The songs were collected from visiting each environment as well as recording some of them.

The difference between each area is depicted by envisioning the lyrics through Arabic lettering and turning each song to an illustrated piece from the original environment. This reflects on how the cultural environment influences the group to create their own kind of folk songs. The style of the posters focuses on analyzing their elements along with integrating them within the lettering designs.

In brief, the project imagines a new archive system. It also works on an experimental perspective for Arabic Lettering. The archive system depends on documenting the songs through merging the text (lettering designs) and sound (songs audios) together. That’s why the project can deeply relate to the second axis : State of Change. The archive brings the traditional folk songs and new technologies/ perspectives all together. It reflects on how valuable the word “Archive” is and the richness it carries, to be presented to the upcoming generations in an interesting way.

• 10th March 2022, 3:15 PM – 4:15 PM
• Atrium
• Upon Registration Only

The canonical history of twentieth-century architecture and design in the English language is, like most histories, a constructed and partial view of reality. Yet it has often been perpetuated by its authors as a universal narrative of modernism consisting of a lineup of architects and designers, often Euro-American men, a progression of styles, and a sequence of masterworks. This reductionist view of history expires as soon as it is brought forth, as new information constantly emerges on that which was left out from narratives previously presented as complete.

Merely adding “newly found” architects and designers or their designs in an effort to make the existing narrative “global” without radically rethinking the very structures that underpin this reading of history do not suffice. New critical histories of design are not to replace one hierarchical narrative with another.

This proposed timeline is presented in two formats when launched in the context of Tasmeem Doha 2022. The timeline visualizes a partial history of architecture and design focusing on Latin America and the Arab World enriched by the inclusion of a slew of geographically diverse political and cultural benchmarks from around the rest of the world. It is anchored in the idea that any view of history is always provisional. There is no finite reading nor any claim to a “complete history” here.

In this talk, Mohamed Elshahed, the curator of the project, will present the timeline and discuss the conceptual ideas that produced it.

Mohamed Elshahed will be giving this talk virtually to a live audience. Seats are limited and are only open to VCUarts Qatar or Education city students, faculty, or alumni. In-person attendees must follow VCUarts Qatar guidelines related to COVID-19.

This event will be streamed live. Members of the public are welcome to ask questions in a moderated chat, at the end of each session.