Dezeen promotion: furniture brand BD Barcelona Design and arts organisation Creative Dialogue have revealed plans to collaborate with five designers from the Gulf region, in a project that aims to celebrate Arab creativity.
BD Barcelona is partnering with design establishments in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain to create the PostCraft Collection. With help from Barcelona-based Creative Dialogue, the brand has enlisted a talented local designer from each of these locations, to create works that merge traditional Arab artisanal skills with contemporary aesthetics.
Maysam Al Nasser from Manana has designed a cabinet for the collection
The project is curated by Syrian-Spanish architect and Creative Dialogue founder Samer Yamani, who sees it as an opportunity to spotlight design from a region that is often overlooked. "It's crucial to embrace local talents and highlight their heritage to feed the global desire for cultural diversity and to participate in the economic shift in the Middle East and North Africa," he said.
Abdulrahman and Turki Gazzaz from Jeddah will contribute a table
The company's art director Ramóm Úbeda believes that the majority of brands place too much focus on European designers.
"The design world is geographically badly distributed. It focuses on a few European capitals? what happens outside of this scenario does not seem to exist," he said. "There is also creative life and a lot of talent in the rest...