Archives of Design and Designing the Archive: Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès and Moe Elhosseiny
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-06-14

00.00 - 42.45 // Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès
42.46 - 1.13.03 // Moe Elhosseiny
1.13.04 – 1.41.18 // Discussion and Q&A


The Arabic Design Library: Alternative Narratives from the Arab World | Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès

In her talk, Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès addresses the importance of documenting and presenting an alternative design history from parts of the world that are rarely covered in main-stream design publications. She presents the series of design monographs, The Arabic Design Library, published by Khatt Books since 2016. The series covers the work of some of the Arab world's design pioneers (including the likes of Hilmi al-Tuni, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Dia Azzawi, Nasri Khattar and Abdulkader Arnaout) who were practicing in the period stretching from the 1960s to the 1980s and who in their own way, engaged with design as a tool for political emancipation and socio-cultural progress.

Arabic Cover Design Archive: Digital Archives as Design Activism | Moe Elhosseiny

Through engaging with Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever, Moe Elhosseiny takes a critical approach to history, archival practices and access in relation to collective memory in South Western Asia and North Africa. With archives being suppressed, neglected, avoided, or locked away, there is an urgency to support collective memory building. Consequently, forms of digital archiving may take on the role of design activism. Elhosseiny founded the Arabic Cover Design Archive which seeks to surface and record book design practices throughout the history of Arabic publishing, providing an accessible digital extension to an often inaccessible physical archive. By making the archive visible through digital means, this project multiplies the instances where engagement with this material can occur. It thus aims to increase the potentiality for creating meaning and greasing the wheels of knowledge production while simultaneously alerting the public to the existence of their history.

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Speaker biographies:

Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès is the Founding Director of the Khatt Foundation and Khatt Books publishers. She holds degrees in design and design history from Leiden University (PhD, 2017), Yale University (MFA, 1990), and Rhode Island School of Design (BFA, 1987). She was a jury member of the Third Jameel Prize for Islamic Art and Design 2013 (Victoria & Albert Museum, London), and member of the grants selection committee for Mondrian Foundation & The Netherlands Architecture (2011-2012) and Design Fund (2013). She is a member of AGI (Alliance Typographique Internationale) since 2015. Dr Smitshuijzen AbiFarès specializes in multilingual typographic research and design, with focus on Arabic typography and design history. She has published several books on typography and design from the Arab World, and contributed essays to professional and academic publications. She is the author of Arabic Typography: A Comprehensive Sourcebook (2001, 2021), Experimental Arabic Type (2002), Typographic Matchmaking (2007), Typographic Matchmaking in the City (2011), Arabic Type Design for Beginners (2013), Nomadic Traces: Journeys of Arabian Scripts (2019), Kameel Hawa: The Art of Shaping Arabic Letters (2019), Typographic Matchmaking in the Maghrib (forthcoming), and The Catholic Press of Beirut: A Printing and Design Legacy in the Arab East (forthcoming). She taught design and typography courses at the American University of Beirut and the American University in Dubai. She works as an independent design curator, researcher, writer, designer, and publisher.

Moe Elhosseiny is a Cairo-based multidisciplinary designer, researcher, and writer. He graduated with a masters degree from Central Saint Martins in Graphic Communication Design. He is the founder of Design Repository and Arabic Cover Design Archive. Broadly his interest in design is where it intersects with other disciplines, especially philosophy, psychology, technology, and cultural studies. He believes that good design is functional, contextual, and culturally relevant. Always being thoughtful, ethical, challenging and beautiful. He is an advocate for design writing and research practices exhibited in his work in Design Repository.

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This event took place on Zoom on Tuesday 11th May 2021 as part of the series Histories and Archives of Arabic Publishing, co-curated and convened by Hana Sleiman (Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge) and Daniel Lowe (British Library). You can read more about this series here: https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2021/04/haap.html.