T-Serai
Modular textiles and pedagogy (2019-)
With MIT Future Heritage Lab
Textile System for Experimental Research in Alternative Impact
The T-Serai is a portable palace for transcultural futures. Inspired by textile histories of the MENA region, the project involves participatory creation of modular tapestries made of recycled clothes. The tapestries can be used to personalize the standardized refugee shelters (T-Shelters), facilitating mobile storage and vertical gardening. They can also be used to set up tents for storytelling and other social gatherings animated through multi-sensory experiences. The different versions T-Serai tents are produced through creative collaborations across borders, involving diverse groups: from Syrian refugees in Jordan to students in the USA, UAE, and Europe. Through the design of motifs, participants can record their personal stories. The multidirectional knowledge exchange between participants of different generations and backgrounds offers a possibility for connecting at the time of growing divides.
One T-Serai prototype is touring for exhibitions, pointing at the social and environmental cost of our consumer lifestyle. Another T-Serai prototype is commissioned in refugee camps in Jordan, probing a culturally sensitive approach to humanitarian intervention. Through the use of recycled clothes, the project explores how the surplus of the global textile industry could benefit the social revitalization of threatened communities. Educational and creative workshops in refugee camps offer means for self-expression and self-determination, thereby also supporting the preservation of the refugees’ living culture. Through the deployment of tapestries in T-Shelters, individuals can influence and appropriate standardized solutions of humanitarian architecture to enact civic life. In so doing, the T-Serai challenges the economy and life as bios approach of the established humanitarian aid system by proposing a new paradigm: to position culture is an essential human need, vital actor of cultural resilience at times of conflict and crisis.
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Tent produced for the T-Serai exhibition at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization (2019) and the Venice Architecture Biennale (2012). Additional tapestries produced in collaborative workshops in USA, Jordan, and UAE.
Media: Tent installation, 9 Ottoman poufs, discarded clothes, tapestry prototypes.
Dimensions: tent W 286 x L 880 x H 470 cm. Individual tapestries 120 x 240 cm.
Concept and artistic direction: Azra Aksamija.
Research team: Azra Aksamija, Natalie Bellefleur, Lillian Kology, Zeid Madi, Melina Philippou.
Prototype development: Azra Aksamija, Natalie Bellefleur, Lillian Kology.
Heat transfer studies: Natalie Bellefleur, Johnathan Kongoletos.
Fabrication: Azra Aksamija, Lyza Baum, Natalie Bellefleur, Joseph Burnhoe, Lillian Kology, Graham Yaeger.
T-Serai designs produced within Azra Aksamija’s course “Foundations in the Arts, Design, and Spatial Practices,” MIT Department of Architecture, Spring 2019 include: Cherie Miot Abbanat CI Component Instructor), Jaya Eyzaguirre and Yaara Yacoby (Teaching Assistants); Students: Zidane Abubakar, Lisbeth Acevedo Ogando, Erika Anderson, Alexander Boccon-Gibod, Landon Buckland, Jierui Fang, Alejandro Gonzalez-Placito, Alice Ho, Effie Jia, Seo Yeon Kwak, Daniel Landez, Christopher Larry, Yi Yang, Annie Zhang.
T-Serai Workshop at the American University of Sharjah produced in collaboration with Alya Alzaabi, Rebecca Beamer, Isabela Marchi Tavares De Melo.
T-Serai Workshops in Al Za’atari and Al Azraq Refugee Camps in Jordan conducted in collaboration with the Norwegian Refugee Council and CARE-Jordan.
Special thanks to: Ulrike Al-Khamis, Aksamija family, Zlatan Filipovic, Raafat Majzoub, Kevin McLellan, Dietmar Offenhuer
Institutional support: Sharjah Museums, the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.