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Home / Terra Piatta / La Crita è Mia, by Raghad Saqfalhait. Part of Soil Futures Residency
Raghad Saqfalhait is the artist selected for the Soil Futures Residency Exchange hosted by KORA - Centro del Contemporaneo. After six weeks in residency, the artist will share her research work on the geography of clay in connection with the cultural, social, economic and urban evolution of Cutrofiano and its territory. The event "La Crita è Mia: On Material and Materiality" took place on the 7 January with an installation and workshop at the Ceramics Museum in Cutrofiano. The artist led visitors to see the installation in conversation with various guests including Francesco Meo, scientific director of the Museo Diffuso di Borgo Terra and the Archaeological Park of Muro Leccese, Salvatore Matteo former director of the Cutrofiano Ceramics Museum, and Donato Colì, ceramist. Following this, Raghad and Donato Colì hold a workshop using local clay and other materials to create a collective sculpture that will be donated to the Museum.
The event was free admission and curated by Vessel in collaboration with Associazione Ramdom.
Soil Futures is an initiative of Arts Catalyst, Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation, Sakiya -Art/Science/Agriculture, Struggles for Sovereignty, and Vessel Art Project. Find Raghad’s reflections on the residency on the Arts Catalyst website.
Soil Futures is funded by the British Council International Collaboration Grants, which are designed to support UK and overseas organisations to collaborate on international arts projects.
Raghad Saqfalhait (1996, Ramallah) is a Palestinian artist and architect working in the multi-disciplinary field of material research and design. She documents and experiments with material, their histories of extraction and transformation, their geological structures and compositions, and their entanglement with questions of property and exploitation within geographies of settler colonialism.
Her work was supported by The Prince Claus Seed Awards 2022, and was part of Riwaq’s research/ artistic project “The Absent Map: Rural Jerusalem in an Alternative Narrative”. She received the JEA prize for her project ‘Scales of Integration: The Body, the Cemetery, and the Terrain’.
She started her long-term project “The Geography of Craft” in 2021 in Al-Jib, Jerusalem and then expanded to other rural contexts like Cutrofiano, Puglia during Soil Futures residency at Kora Contemporary Arts Center with Art Vessel. In that framework, she conducted multiple hands-on workshops and installations over the past two years such as “La Crita è mia! On Material and Materiality” in Cutrofiano, “Wild Clay Lab” in Al-Jib, and “Molding with Waste” in Ramallah.
In 2019, she co-founded Sakeb; a design collective working on, about, and through waste; especially waste produced by the Stone and Marble Industry in Palestine. Sakeb was exhibited in multiple venues including Milan Design Week (2022), Amman design Week (2019), Warehouse421, Art Jameel, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, Beit Obaid Al-Shamsim A.M. Qattan Foundation.