Visionary Threads: Collective Quilting on Tripoli’s Syria Street

Quilting is both a creative act and a practice of communal sustenance that covers material, sensory, and emotional domains. Quilt designs often narrate dreams and memories or send messages. Storytelling and community building are inherent to the processes of making and using quilts.

In 2023, sixty women from the Ruwwad association in Tripoli experimented with these layers of creative practice. They worked under the guidance of Huda Baroudi and Maria Hibri, co-founders of Bokja Design. Stitching on the border of Syria Street, which has separated Jabal Mohsen and Bab el Tabbeneh since the 1970s, the group envisioned restorative and sustainable connectivity through the design and creation of highly textured wall hangings made from upcycled fabrics.

Quilting connects to a rich history of textile projects focused on social empowerment, engaged art practice, and memory work. Most Ruwwad quilters learned the historically feminine practices of stitching, crocheting, and knitting in familial and vocational settings. They were not exposed to the elite realm of “high art.” Many contemporary textile exhibitions are currently challenging this.

Agial Gallery supports this project to highlight artists’ social engagement within their societies. The gallery upholds the value of quilting, once seen as “outsider” or “folk” art in the Euro-American art world. The women and their collaborators engage in a slow disciplinary unraveling. They show how gender and socioeconomic class shape and are shaped by lingering hierarchies that distinguish art from craft, high from low, and professional from amateur.

The Ruwwad quilters delve into a rich terrain of collective quilting practices aimed at mending societal divisions. Their artistry demonstrates the restorative power of their work.