Jusoor Design Collections lands in Milan, framing Saudi Design as a practice of exchange
This collaboration brings together 5 Saudi designers and 3 international collaborators to ask what it means to make something together – across cultures, materials, and geographies still finding their common language.
Five Saudi designers, three international collaborations, one room at Pinacoteca di Brera during a week when every courtyard in Milan becomes a statement of intent. “How can we bridge the gap for Saudi designers to reach the world?” – that was the question Samer Yamani, Curator and Creative Director, started from. What Jusoor Design Collections offers is harder to pull off than an answer – not a defined identity, but the process of one taking shape.
Jusoor means bridges in Arabic. But the most interesting bridges are the ones that span unlikely distances, more than the ones connecting points that were already close. Riyadh, New Delhi, Kathmandu, Barcelona: the geographies of this exhibition say something before you’ve even looked at the objects.
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Commissioned by Saudi Arabia’s Architecture & Design Commission, the project pairs a new generation of Saudi designers with established international brands, letting material experimentation, local knowledge, and shared making drive the work – exploring local creativity through the lens of culture and society, not only through practice but through its impact on local crafts and materials. The Milan presentation is the first time these collaborations are shown together, and what connects them is a shared willingness to leave things unresolved.
The clearest thread running through the exhibition is a refusal of easy synthesis. In Thanoon, Muotaz Abbas and Klove Studio translate the resilience of a desert plant into a large-scale lighting object in glass, metal, natural fibers and, here, growth patterns are abstracted into a system of interconnected forms, where light and shadow do structural work.
Aseel Alamoudi continues the conversation with the same studio in Takween, a series of table lamps holding sandstone, glass, and steel in deliberate tension, making each material keep its own character, resisting full integration. Light, again, is the only thing holding them together, which feels less like a compositional choice and more like an honest description of how cross-cultural making actually works.
That tension shifts register in the CORA Collection, developed by Abeer AlRabiah and Albandari Sulaiman – who was born and raised in Jeddah, the bride of the Red Sea, a city shaped by its proximity to the shore – in collaboration with Iwan Maktabi. Woven carpets are reconfigured into sculptural seating drawn from coral species native to Saudi waters: the reef, its colors, the life that exists beyond the surface. The pieces move between object and environment, with bleached variations introducing an ecological subtext without spelling it out. The conversation has widened from material to ecosystem, from the studio to something harder to contain.
The most personal work in the exhibition is TAH Bookshelf, a collaboration between Saud Alsaleh and the Spanish studio Lagranja Design. “The development of this library became a very personal story,” says the designer, who has lived with dyslexia since childhood. Its spiral structure – part furniture, part narrative device – reframes reading and knowledge as non-linear processes. It’s the piece most resistant to straightforward function, and the one that sits least comfortably within the idea of a national design showcase. Which is precisely what makes it worth pausing in front of.
Across these works, Jusoor resists the temptation to present Saudi design as a fixed thing. The point is to show a scene still defining itself – globally connected, materially grounded, shaped by exchange without being dissolved by it. In the broader context of Milan Design Week, where national pavilions tend to streamline complexity into visibility, this exhibition doesn’t resolve the questions it raises about authorship, cultural exchange, or what it means to make something together across distance. It makes them visible, for now, in one room in Brera.
About the author
Ludovica Proietti, journalist, design historian and curator, teaches in universities and curates events, always exploring projects with fresh, unconventional perspectives.
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