THE WEAVE, UNBOUND
Abu Dhabi, November 2025
At the Abu Dhabi edition of the travelling design fair NOMAD, Bottega Veneta’s Destinations exhibition unfolded like a confident meditation inspired by the brand’s most potent signature. Marking fifty years of the Italian luxury house’s Intrecciato weave, the exhibition gathered eight voices from across West Asia and North Africa, each invited to respond to the braid that shaped a legacy.
Curated by Rana Beiruti, the showcase became a landscape of converging lineages: ceramic sheets folded like fabric, volcanic stone coaxed into rhythm, echoes of Areesh architecture, palm-frond traditions reframed, and reserve Intrecciato leather reimagined with new intent. Here, weaving emerged not only as a technique but as a philosophy – an act of encounter, unity, and movement resonating deeply across the region.
During the fair, Shadowplay met with four designers whose works anchored the exhibition to speak about their singular takes honouring the brand’s timeless technique.
BAHRAINI – DANISH
How would you describe the essence of your design practice? What are you looking to achieve with it?
bahraini — danish is an ever-evolving practice driven by curiosity and the distinct sensibilities of its members. Our work grows from a shared interest in how places, materials, and encounters shape the way people live and remember. We move across disciplines because every project asks for a different way of thinking and making. What we look for is a practice that remains open, responsive, and grounded, and that continues to create work that feels connected to lived experience while allowing room for new possibilities.
What are the materials you are most drawn to in your practice?
The materials we work with change constantly, guided by the questions each project raises. In Mesh! We worked with teak, exploring the traditional craftsmanship. We also work with metal frequently. Sometimes the material itself becomes the starting point, shaping the ideas and forms that follow, rather than the other way around.
How do your everyday surroundings influence the way you create?
Our work grows out of the places and landscapes where we spend time. We also observe the improvisations people make in their daily environments. These small adjustments often reveal new possibilities, and we explore a whole chapter of this in our book Positive Encounters.
When you first encountered Bottega Veneta’s Intrecciato, what thread – material, emotional, or ancestral – pulled you into dialogue with it, and where did it lead you?
The first connection was tactile. The structure of Intrecciato carries a clarity born from patience, and it resonates with traditions of handwork, where rhythm and repetition are integral to making. This thread led us to explore how such softness could behave when translated into a material that resists bending. That question became the starting point for Mesh!.
What spatial experience, or state of mind, do you hope your piece offers the viewers?
In our interactions with viewers at the show, we noticed a curiosity about the making itself. The piece is not immediately straightforward in how it is constructed, and that is the beauty of the weave. The craftsmanship is central: each part is carefully shaped and joined, and the work only comes together as a single form when every element fits. We hope viewers sense the time, care, and precision behind the design and craftsmanship.
bahraini — danish is an architectural office based between Bahrain and Copenhagen.
SHAHA RAPHAEL
How would you describe the essence of your design practice? What are you looking to achieve with it?
My practice is rooted in place; local materials, intuitive forms, and collaboration with skilled artisans, while maintaining a hands-on approach led by a curiosity about making. It’s a broad world I am trying to create by not defining the scale at which it manifests.
What are the materials you are most drawn to in your practice?
Exploring local places of manufacture, I’ve been drawn to stone, limestone and volcanic stone, which is what this land is made of. We have a small-scale industry of metal, too, which leads me to explore the various techniques to work with it.
When you first encountered Bottega Veneta’s Intrecciato, what thread — material, emotional, or ancestral — pulled you into dialogue with it, and where did it lead you?
When I read the brief, my approach was to imagine the Intrecciato not as a pattern to apply, but as something already embedded in the landscape — almost like a fossil waiting to be uncovered. So my piece is made of nine continuous volcanic stone tiles, where the weave appears and fades across the surface, as if surgically extracted from a much larger geological plain. I love thinking in deep time, and I asked myself what future civilisations — human or non-human — might discover about us if they were to excavate our craft traditions. The Intrecciato becomes a trace, a memory pressed into stone, carried forward thousands of years.
What spatial experience, or state of mind, do you hope your piece offers the viewers?
It was interesting to see the curiosity my piece posed. I like that people had to touch it to tell what material it was. It’s a very rough, ferric stone that I attempted to soften by incorporating traces of the weave to make it look as leathery as possible. I like to provoke curiosity in the sense that the imagination of the other adds to the piece. For me, this piece is part of a much wider landscape full of Intrecciato weave fossils and undulations. And some people did imagine that on a huge wall in an interior, or garden floor as a sculpture.
Shaha Raphael is an architect and maker based in Beirut, Lebanon.
NADER GAMMAS
How would you describe the essence of your design practice? What are you looking to achieve with it?
I would describe it as an exploration of form and material, bridging sculpture and function.
What are the materials you are most drawn to in your practice?
At the moment, it’s ceramics, and I’m exploring what comes next.
How do your everyday surroundings influence the way you create?
I try to look beyond the city and into the serenity of the desert.
When you first encountered Bottega Veneta’s Intrecciato, what thread — material, emotional, or ancestral — pulled you into dialogue with it, and where did it lead you?
I think what I tried to do with the design iterations was break it free from the weave and move it into a new interpretation. In the end, I wanted to extract the essence of the brand and make it unmistakable.
What spatial experience, or state of mind, do you hope your piece offers the viewers?
An immediate satisfaction, but lots of meaning to uncover, and leave to the viewer.
Nader Gammas is a lighting designer based in Dubai.
AMINE ASSELMAN
How would you describe the essence of your design practice? What are you looking to achieve with it?
The essence of my practice is pure geometric research. I hold a PhD in contemporary art, and over the years, I have developed my own constructive geometric methodology that allows me to assemble figures ad infinitum from a single segment.
My work began with an investigation of the segment on a flat plane and, over time, has evolved toward the creation of complex volumetric structures.
I’m not sure that asking what I intend to achieve is the right question. If we think of geometry as an infinite language, then my practice is not oriented toward a concrete achievement but is, above all, a research process in continuous development, where the process itself is its own end.
What are the materials you are most drawn to in your practice?
I work with clay, a material deeply linked to the traditional craftsmanship of Morocco and to my geometric practice with Zellige [traditional Moroccan decorative tilework]. At the same time, I approach this material from an innovative perspective: I experiment with new clays and high-temperature materials, which, combined with mineral oxides, allow me to create much more intense glazes than traditional ones.
However, for the collaboration with Bottega Veneta, I was thrilled to bring my geometric language to a completely new medium: the brand’s exceptional leather.
How do your everyday surroundings influence the way you create?
We could say that my artistic practice began by revisiting the Tétouan Zellige and exploring its geometric games and possibilities. However, as I mentioned before, my current work goes far beyond that. My studio is located in Tétouan and, whenever possible, I use local materials in all my creations.
When you first encountered Bottega Veneta’s Intrecciato, what thread — material, emotional, or ancestral — pulled you into dialogue with it, and where did it lead you?
The thread was primarily structural and conceptual. My geometric research focuses on developing forms capable of generating an infinite number of configurations and integrating perfectly with each other. The Intrecciato is the intertwining of different elements to create a singular whole. This connection led me to reinterpret it volumetrically, using the leather to create a raised landscape of geometric figures connected by layered superimposition.
What spatial experience, or state of mind, do you hope your piece offers the spectators?
I hope the work transmits a sense of transformation, mutation, and fluidity, and that the audience perceives how this mathematical game could be perfectly applied to the concept of Intrecciato. I also want to highlight the vision of the curator, Rana Beiruti, who has successfully established a dialogue between all the pieces in the exhibition, bringing value to the diverse creative and artisanal practices of the region.
Amine Asselman is a Moroccan artist.
Interviews by Martin Onufrowicz
All images courtesy of NOMAD and Bottega Veneta