Set in Stone

Following the second year of Arabic Letter Lab and its Experiment 02–2023, 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. We hear from them about the Arabic letter, its ancestral heritage of ancient scripts in Jordan and the region, its variant practices, its aesthetic theory and female history. Moreover, we tapped into topics about the value of learning and unlearning of Arabic letters in school education and more. Additionally, we also had a conversation with the 11 participants to talk about their personal histories and future projections. We then explore a documentation of the lab’s process, starting with 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 museum followed by lecture and archive digging at Elharf House with Hussein Alazaat all to come up with ideas for what we want to do, then 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.