29,000 hand-crafted clay bricks narrate shared histories at the saudi arabia pavilion in venice

at the venice biennale 2026, clay bricks become vessels of memory

For the Venice Art Biennale 2026, artist Dana Awartani fills the Saudi Arabian Pavilion with a vast earthen mosaic landscape composed of more than 29,000 hand-crafted clay bricks. Titled ‘May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones’, the installation draws together references from historic mosaic traditions across the Arab world, creating a meditation on cultural heritage, loss, and collective memory. The project, realized through nearly 30,000 hours of artisanal labor, places the knowledge and skills of master craftspeople at its core.

At a time when many traditional practices face disappearance, Awartani foregrounds craft as a living system of knowledge transmission, sustained through care and the collective act of making.

Dana Awartani draws from endangered mosaic traditions

Occupying the pavilion floor like an imagined archaeological site, the work invites visitors to navigate a network of earthen pathways that weave through intricate geometric, floral, and faunal motifs. Drawing from mosaic traditions found across Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, the installation reveals the deep cultural connections that have linked communities across the region for millennia. Awartani emphasizes the shared histories embedded within material culture, highlighting how artistic traditions often transcend borders.

The material composition of the project reinforces its central message. Developed from four differently hued clay earths sourced from distinct geographies across Saudi Arabia, the hand-formed bricks are assembled without binding agents. As the material dries and inevitably cracks over time, the installation becomes a physical manifestation of fragility and loss, presenting heritage as a living entity vulnerable to neglect, violence, and erasure.

Equally significant is the process through which the work was created. Awartani’s practice embraces the notion of many hands, a principle rooted in craft traditions where authorship is collective. Over nearly 30,000 hours, artisans worked alongside the artist to shape, fire, assemble, and refine the thousands of components that comprise the installation. Their contributions extend beyond technical execution, embodying generations of accumulated knowledge that continue to survive through practice and transmission.

many hands sustain cultural heritage at the saudi arabia pavilion

This emphasis on collaboration reflects a broader transformation in contemporary craft. Increasingly, designers, artists, and architects are shifting attention away from the finished object and toward the networks of expertise that make it possible. Traditional techniques are being revisited not only for their aesthetic value but also for the forms of cultural memory they contain. In this context, craft functions as an archive, preserving skills, stories, and relationships that might otherwise disappear.

Awartani’s installation demonstrates how these practices can engage with urgent contemporary concerns. The work activates historical forms to address questions of conflict, displacement, and cultural responsibility through a slow, labor-intensive process of making that becomes an act of care, offering an alternative to systems of production defined by speed and efficiency.

In ‘May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones’, craft emerges as a form of cultural infrastructure, capable of carrying memory across generations while creating new possibilities for collective making in the present.

project info:

name: May your tears never dry, you who weep over stones

artist: Dana Awartani | @danaawartanistudio

curator: Antonia Carver | @antoniamcarver

assistant curator: Hafsa Alkhudairi

commissioner: Visual Arts Commission, Saudi Arabia

event: 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia

dates: May 9th – November 22nd, 2026

location: Arsenale, Venice, Italy

This article is part of designboom’s Crafting the Future chapter, exploring what it means to be a maker in today’s world and the future of craftsmanship. Discover more related stories here.