A pearl and a cochineal insect are worlds apart. One is tied to Qatar’s history of pearl diving, while the other produces the vivid red pigment used in Mexico for centuries. In The Sower, Mexican designer Fernando Laposse brings them together to explore how people shape materials and how materials, in turn, shape culture.
On view at Fereej Al Asmakh from 5 November to 31 January as part of the Design Doha Biennale, the exhibition includes silk lamps coloured with cochineal and details that recall pearls. The objects are striking, but the stories behind them matter just as much. The knowledge that gives these materials its meaning and value is also in focus.
That attention to people and process runs through Laposse’s work. For a decade, he has collaborated with farmers in Tonahuixtla, a Mixtec community in Mexico. Together, they have developed ways to work with locally available materials, including corn husk and loofah, drawing on agricultural knowledge to create new skills and sources of income.
In Doha, that interest in cultivation becomes a seed library, conceived as a starting point for sharing knowledge about plants and growing in difficult climates. It gives The Sower a focus beyond the objects on view, connecting design to land, sustainability, and the communities who care for it.
The exhibition creates room to notice where their experiences meet: in the value placed on natural materials and in the ways that knowledge can be carried forward. That theme of expanding tradition and preserving craft knowledge by finding its contemporary purpose runs through all Year of Culture exhibitions this season (see Expanded Tradition story).
