Febrik
Art, design and community engagement – Lebanon, UK
2014
  • “CREATIVE REFUGE”

This publication by Febrik – a non-profit collaborative platform for participatory art and design – showcases three workshops held for children in Burj El Barajne Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. The book, designed in collaboration with Ahmad Gharbieh, is part research catalogue, part educational manual, part record of children’s stories, dreams and spaces of play. It covers all three workshops and is set in two languages—Arabic and English. The design challenges of honoring this level of complexity in one book, in addition to the amateur nature of the photography and work documentation, were the kinds of restraints that ultimately opened up the possibilities of layout interpretation. The result is a book that proposes a radical bilingual design solution, incorporates physical departures from the typical book format, and hosts a wide variety of grid structures and playful compositional frameworks that reflect the cut-paste, mix-match, almost unpredictable qualities of a child’s creative mind.

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