Mass Imperfections

At Dubai Design Week 2016 Palestinian architects Elias and Yousef Anastas designed Mass Imperfection, a pavilion composed of several handmade olive wood modules.

Mass Imperfections by Palestinian architects Elias and Yousef Anastas is composed of several handmade olive wood modules assembled into a structure that bears resemblance to both a piece of traditional Palestinian embroidery from a village in the hills of Judea and to a prop from the set of a sciencefiction film from the 1970.

In order to elaborate Mass Imperfections, the brothers worked with Luay Nassrallah, an artisan from Beit Jala, who uses a machine to cut the olive wood. In Palestine, the souvenir industry is a sprawling moneymaking machine. Pilgrims are brought into cities such as Bethlehem, and pressured into buying ‘authentic’ or ‘holy’ olive wood trinkets that are often mass-produced elsewhere and have little to do with Palestine.

But the project does not fetishize arts and crafts. It is not simply a critique of mass production. It is a proposal: it suggests new ways to blend the human and the machine.

Mass Imperfections reintroduces human error as a fundamental element of creativity. The glitch is at the basis of its creative process: temporary malfunctions of machines trigger unheard of ways of seeing reality. The structure, in fact, is a constellation of glitches. It celebrates humanity in its mass imperfections.

Mass Imperfections, Dubai, UAE
Program: pavilion
Architects: AAU Anastas
Curators: Elias & Yousef Anastas
Dubai Design Week 2016
Area: 7,7 sqm