Memory Apparent

How can designers help us better understand our present moment by examining our collective past? 

The Fall 2022 cycle of the Masaha Residency will focus on bringing together emerging and mid-career creatives, hosting 10 artists and 1 writer for a 3-month period of discourse, research, and experimentation at Prince Faisal bin Fahd Arts Hall in Riyadh.

How can designers capture longing? How can they help us better understand our present moment by examining our collective past? We invite Saudi and international designers to explore nostalgia and wistfulness in using certain experiences leading to revivals, reboots, and homages. 

Nostalgia has always been used as a comfort blanket, almost an antidote to new, contemporary, and potentially threatening changes. It becomes tangible—trusted—in the wake of any significant changes.  

This edition of the Masaha Residency opens the conversation to how design can be interpreted, shared, mined, or performed.  Can reinterpreting memories bring a sense of genuineness and connectivity to your design or campaign? By looking at the legacy of human activity passed into the memory of material culture through design and focusing on the idea of nostalgia, the residents will research and produce works that examine how design can be a means to construct, repair, and speculate about the past. 

Designers not only make but have the power to shape the development of networks and communities, influence identities, make some things possible and others not, all through the design process itself.  

Who should apply:  

Designers who can develop a new body of work for a showcase; working towards an exhibition which addresses a broader theme at the end of the experience.

• Production designers
• Industrial designers 
• Textile designers
• Graphic designers