FADHEL MOURALI


About

Projects:


The last basket makers from Risa:
crafting a plural kinship along tradition (2025)



       In Thoughts, Together (2022-2023)
        Research (2022)
        Exhibition (2023)
        Essay + Talk (2023)


      To Be and To Become (2021-2022)
            Research (2021)
            Publication (2021)
            Essay + Talk (2022)

                
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Photos by Molly Overstall Khan, Alex Cancino Rodriguez, Daniel Engvall

To Be and To Become (2021-2022)

My Swedish great-grandfather Lennart Pettersson was an artisan known as ‘the last basket maker from Risa’.  

Risa is a small community within the village of Hedared in west Sweden.

Through a study that has touched upon the Hedared basket both in theory and practice, I have strived to understand its cultural historical relevance, social influence, and contemporary significance. In this body of work, a mode of practice has formed, that in extension has been an attempt to deconstruct the interrelationship of our two realities; my own need to use handicraft as a tool from which to derive a sense of identity, purpose, and belonging, and my great grandfather’s need to use craft as a means of survival, providing him with the identity of a craft practitioner. 

I wanted to showcase the social and cultural evolution that occurred between our generations — to locate, examine, and understand the cultural elements and societal norms which we both have lived under that has ultimately conditioned our relation to making.


Moving between theory and practice, the essential elements of this site specific craft was identified, and then interpreted through jacquard weaving and 3-D printing. This initial stage resulted in a filament material, made from the Hedared basket’s unique material process. 

I spun the wood fibres of Lennarts baskets into yarn, whilst processing the fibres as pieces of storytelling. 

This ongoing body of work has since been shown at the Textile Museum of Sweden, is part of the travelling group exhibition Generation Why, and was presented at the Nordic conference Preserving skills for the future – maintaining knowledge chains  

Photo by Molly Overstall Khan

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