Entangled Matters by Adrian Pepe
During Dubai Design Week 2021, discover the universe of Adrian Perez, also know as Adrian Pepe. Born in Honduras, based in Beirut, Adrian’s recent work uses Awassi wool from a sheep bred in the Levantine region for over 5,000 years.
Dubai Design Week 2021 offers a platform of opportunity for rising and established Lebanese designers and craftsmen to feature their unique works in two creative showcases across this year's festival.
The Beirut Concept Store*, curated by Mariana Wehbe, founder and creative director of MWPR, showcases an experiential journey into the heart of the Lebanese design scene, presenting the diversity of the city and its talent in its simplest form.
Amongst the designers presented in Dubai, Adrian Perez (aka. Adrian Pepe) presents his recent works made out of wool. One of his latest projects is called ‘Entangled Matters’.
Born in Honduras, Adrian has always been fascinated by textiles and textures because of the relations between the way the senses and the body are involved in the process of making a piece of fabric.
After his graduation at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, he joined the design label Bokja in Beirut, in 2014, where he still serves as artistic director.
With Huda Baroudi and Maria Hibri (right), the two founders, he shares his love of juxtapositions.
Entangled Matters is a project that draws multiple links.
It began in 2018 with an ancient animal fibre: Awassi wool, bred in the Levantine region for over 5,000 years.
This particular breed of sheep is a central figure in the human narrative, traditionally within the contexts pastoral imagery, biblical fables, and ritualistic practices of Abrahamic religions.
Through the process of spinning, hand-guided embroidery, and felting, the wool is transformed into material artifacts laden with perspiration, emotions, mythologies, and symbolism.
An intimate association transpires between the craftsperson and the crafted object, as the raw materials become hybridised skins in the form of large scale tapestries that summon themes of transcorporeality and biocentrism.
Felt is the oldest known textile, and its craft reflects an ancient complex task entailing the compression of fibres, and in the process, the condensation of history, context, locality, skill, the practitioner, and the animal.
Adrian’s work awakens a dormant instinct of a more tangible understanding of nature, an ancestral memory of simplicity in complexity and aversion to redundancy. Its revival in contemporary form engages the local community and celebrates an ancient skill and the civilisation attached to it.
During these unprecedented times, this moment of global fragility invites us to search for answers from a more integrated perspective, revisiting more primal and grounded forms of existence. It is in times of crisis that we find most freedom and clarity, exploring the realm of possibility to creatively shift our perspective toward a better future.
His work focuses on craftsmanship from socio-cultural, aesthetic, ecological and methodological perspectives.
He studies the relational ties we form with objects over time; how they are made and replicated, transferred and adopted, how they change and adapt.
His integrated approach interweaves culture, history, and performance with design, fashion, and interiors.
Throughout his work, he performs a sort of creative shadowgraphy, crafting objects and experiences as tools to enable an open discourse on materiality, our morphing cultural landscape, and present condition.
“Wool in the changing tones of the earth, from ocher to chestnut, in addition to celebrating ancestral know-how, to creating an intimate relationship with the earth, is a blank page where symbolism, myths and emotions come to life. ”
*The Beirut Concept Store is also presenting design creations from Exil, Atelier Nadeen, Lina Shamma, Maria Halios, Nathalie Khayat, Souraya Haddad, Zein Daouk, Carlo and Mary-Lynn Massoud, Post Industrial Crafts, Samer Bou Rjeily, Studio Caramel, The Tables Series, Yakin, Beirut JTM, Cut Paste Build.
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