Here is a project that takes charge in proposing new relationships between building materials, artisan-ship, building knowledge, and the design industry within Palestinian environments.

Started as an experiment in 2011, Local Industries is today a testimony to the possibilities for design practices to operate in opposition to the policies and economies that undermine indigenous knowledge of materials and continuous dynamic traditions of construction, and that privilege monopolizing, often orientalizing, mass production.

The materials presented here are made through a humble choreography of cooperation where the processes of designing and making are interweaved. Keeping aware of the contemporary design industry’s tendencies for a fetishistic relationship with artisanship and for savior discourses, Local Industries proposes a form of practice based on collaboration, rejecting orientalist clichés, and opening new global avenues for small-scale Palestinian industries, while also hinting at the possibilities for alternative and cooperative economic models in design and fabrication.
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Nora Akawi