Exhibition
IN MUHARRAQ, A PEARLING PATH
In Muharraq, the UNESCO World heritage site Pearling, Testimony of an Island Economy relates the unique legacy of Bahrain’s pearling era through the architecture and urban heritage of the old city as well as three oyster beds. The project is an ongoing work in progress that adapts itself to the challenges of a changing city, and to reinventing the city within its existing footprint. The exhibition presents both the results and the process of making, through models, objects, minutes of meetings, artefacts, drawings, and conversations, showing the project in its current state. It explores the challenges in reviving the memory of pearling, as a backdrop to a culturallyled development approach and as a binder between the physical makings of the city and its identity, and questions whether pearls, oysters, coral stones, cars, and humans can sustainably and generously cohabit in the city today.
Installation
The pavilion consists of an artificial “plateau” on which the different objects are exposed, taking most of the space in the room, and leaving a narrow circumambulatory passage. It showcases fragment of the ingredients that compose the Muharraqi revival process, whether it involves single building projects or urban scale regeneration policies. These fragments include natural components such as oyster shells, mock-ups of new developments such as the public spaces designed by Office KGDVS and Bas Smets, architectural models such as the models of the multistorey car parks designed by Christian Kerez, original pieces extracted from the traditional Muharraqi architecture and working documents such as the ones related to an urban upgrade project, put together by Gulf House Engineering.
As the “Pearling Path” World Heritage Site revolves around a narrative- that of the foregone pearling economy- so does the pavilion, as its different components tell the chapters of the development’s “story”. While the pearling visitor centre, designed by Valerio Olgiati, highlights the role of the Site as a social binder providing an agora for the city; the Siyadi Pearl Museum, designed by Studio Anne Holtrop, turns the attention towards the history of craftmanship and exchange of knowledge that Muharraq witnessed. Elsewhere, the exposé of heritage conservation approaches, made by Studio Gionata Rizzi through two models, puts the accent on the value of heritage as a new economic driver for the former pearling city.
