Para-aramid synthetic fiber (K29 Kevlar®); with cotton-thread embroidery in cross-stitch. This project explores the potential of Kevlar® as a powerful material used to resist bullets and similar flying projectiles. Having been transported into Lebanon from the US, the length of Kevlar® was then delivered into the home of a woman in the Ain al-Hilweh Refugee Camp in Saida, who was requested to embroider this traditional pattern upon the textile in cross-stitch to preserve the structural integrity of the Kevlar fiber. Wrapping it around one’s head, the Keffiyeh’s performance is increased through the layering of material and the multi-directionality of the weave. It does so while maintaining an omnipresence in the battlefield and for a moment disturbing the representational fixity of the victim.

Salim Al Kadi

Message

Follow

Born in Beirut, Lebanon Al Kadi works with the fleeting space between the built environment and the tools of representation deployed in making and unmaking it. Through model making and prototyping he construct unexpected, critically provocative, and generatively illusive, objects. In 2016, Al Kadi produced the K29 Keffiyeh, a traditional Arab head scarf embroidered onto Kevlar, a material designed to resist flying projectiles, which was exhibited in 2017 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. On January 1, 2020 and in the midst of the October Revolution, he published Beirut 001, the first readily available open-source digital 3D model of Beirut to collectively re-imagine the city. After the 2020 August 4th Beirut port explosion, the model became a source for first responders, local and international professionals. In 2014 Al Kadi co-founded The Sigil Collective and co-produced ‘Monuments of the Everyday’ a series of projects which were exhibited at the XXII Triennale di Milan (2019), Sixth Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016), Sixth Marrakesh Biennale (2016), 13th Sharjah Biennale (2016), and Fourteenth International Architecture Exhibition in Venice (2014).