ARABIC
LETTER
LAB

2023

In the second book, titled “Set in Stone”, we wanted to create a publication that encompasses three stages of the workshop; steady as a rock, on paper, and run with scissors.

We kick off by taking it back to basics with features from researchers, friends and unearthed articles. They delve into the Arabic letter, its ancestral heritage of ancient scripts in Jordan and the region, and its aesthetic and cultural theories. Moreover, we tap into the value of learning and unlearning of Arabic letters in school education and have a conversation with the participants to talk about their personal histories and future projections.

We then explore a documentation of the lab’s process, starting with a lecture by Hussein Alazaat and archive-digging at his Elharf House. Following that is a guided tour in The Jordan Museum to understand script evolution in the land of Jordan, as well as tours exploring Arab modern art and local signage، all to come up with ideas for what we want to do. The next step sees us working tirelessly towards creating 11 new, experimental, sentimental, speculative Arabic typefaces of distant pasts and near futures.

We finally go into the showcase with a peek into the exhibition held at eyen’s space in Amman, featuring a larger-than-life display of the typographic installations. The showcase also features the specimens of the 11 experimental Arabic typefaces that were inspired from the ancient writing systems, urban landscape, folk-tales, traditional forms, speculative design, geology, Y2K boom, mythology, geometry, jewellery, motion, womanhood and nature!