Bedouin women weave a harmonious Balance
A Danish couple links up with the entrepreneurial women of Lakiya in the Negev to create contemporary rugs on traditional looms
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
It’s an unexpected rug. Woven and sewn into an uneven shape in the ecru shades of the Negev desert, it’s fringed on two ends with a lone green-belled tassel dangling from a single corner. Yet there is harmony in the composition, a woven metaphor for an unusual collaborative project that included two designers — one of whom is Israeli, the other Japanese — and the Bedouin women of Lakiya Negev Weaving.
The Holland-based designers, Sayaka Yamamoto and Boaz Cohen, call it Balance, a series of seven area rugs woven by the women of Lakiya, using the wool of local desert sheep hand woven on traditional ground looms. For Yamamoto and Cohen, it’s part of their ongoing exploration of traditional crafts titled Origin, a project from their Holland-based design firm, BCXSY.
They first met at Holland’s Design Academy Eindhoven, later becoming partners in work and life. Cohen, who moved to Holland from Israel 13 years ago, comments that they don’t “do art.”
“‘We don’t like using that term,” he said. “We see ourselves as designers which means that whatever we do should have a function and do it well.”
Their first project, Origin Part I, was based in Japan, Yamamoto’s homeland, where they collaborated with a master in traditional Japanese wood joinery. The idea, as with all their Origin projects, was to learn and be inspired by a craft and develop something new. The final product in Origin Part I was a wooden room divider made according to the traditional techniques.
It wasn’t necessarily obvious to Cohen to do a similar project in Israel, particularly as he has his own political issues with his native land. “I didn’t want to get involved there,” he said, speaking on the phone from Cork, Ireland, where they’re currently involved in the Origin III project. He felt it would be difficult to work with traditional crafts in a country “that has only been in existence for a few decades.”
Then they had the idea to look at the minorities in Israel, “because many of them have been there longer than most of the Jewish people,” said Cohen.
They came across the women of Lakiya Negev Weaving through a friend in the area. Located in the Negev Bedouin town of Lakiya, it is a cooperative of local Bedouin women weavers, founded by Sidreh, a non-profit organization focused on improving the standard of living of Bedouin women living in the Negev. Bedouin women have been weaving rugs for generations, making and furnishing their tents with rugs from goat and camel hair. Through Sidreh, they began selling their creations in the late 1990s, becoming entrepreneurs in the process.
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The Lakiya looms are simple, sometimes just a beam of wood or plastic tube balanced on two industrial size olive cans set on the floor that creates long, narrow strips of material that are later sewn together to form larger area rugs or sewn into pillows, oversize floor cushions and bags. Most of the 75 women at the workshop spend around four hours each day at work, some spinning and weaving, others dyeing the wool and a handful in quality control.
“Different weavers require different amounts of time to make a rug,” explained Katie Simpson, an American intern who recently spent six months in Lakiya, handling marketing and leading tours of the workshop. The women are paid flat rates per rug, and in cash, as there is no bank in Lakiya and the nearest one is a considerable bus ride away.
The Lakiya women have gained a lot of familial and communal power through their weaving, commented Simpson. They now help make economic decisions in their families, their daughters are more likely to finish high school and go to college, and some of the women have become entrepreneurs on their own, leaving the workshop to start their own businesses.
For Cohen and Yamamoto, the ability to work with the Lakiya women offered an opportunity to help engender more employment for Bedouin women, who live, as Cohen wrote, “in a constant state of inequality, of imbalance.”
Cohen and Yamamoto stayed in and around Lakiya for several weeks, spending time with the women in order to observe and ask as many questions as possible about the weaving process.
“We wanted to see if it could be done differently, if there were other applications,” he said. “We always want to innovate in the specific fields in which we’re working while remaining respectful to the origins.”
The weaving in Lakiya is simple but complicated, said Cohen, with an extremely limited technique, as each strip is woven in straight patterns. When the weaving cooperative first opened, there was a long period of experimentation, said Simpson, as the women tried to figure out what methods would work best for weaving marketable rugs. Cohen and Yamamoto didn’t want to create something complicated that would take months for the weavers to complete. Yet they wanted to produce a different, more contemporary design that would open up new markets for the weavers.
Toward the end of their trip, the final design came together as Cohen and Yamamoto began playing with the rectangular woven pieces. By combining different shapes together in an alternate composition, they found it created a certain kind of balance.
The Lakiya collaboration with BCXSY could prove to be a boon for business, as Cohen and Yamamoto offered their design services as well as access to their international network of clients. They’ve already shown Balance at a Milan design fair and as per their agreement, BCXSY receives a percentage of each rug sold, so there is incentive on all sides to sell this series.
“It’s all about mutual benefit and interest; it’s not always possible, but that’s the idea,” said Cohen of the collaboration. “It was very motivating to make something that could help the women, and we were very amazed by their positive attitude. This is a great chance to do something that I see as right.”
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