Event:

El HEMA Project

El HEMA is a non-commercial cultural project by the Mediamatic Foundation in Amsterdam.

24 aug 2007
6 jan 2008

What would an Arabic HEMA look like? Halal sausage? Arabic chocolate letters? Affordable high quality headscarves? 3 Palestinian scarfs (kaffia) for the price of 2? Tunics or Djballas? School notebooks with lining for Arabic, which reads from right to left? Ali Baba and the 40 store robbers? Camel milk? Arabic poetry on duvet covers? Jibril and Jamilah children's champagne? North African wine?

El Hema logos - El Hema logos (Left: new logo, designed by Wael Morcos. Right: old logo, designed by Tarek Atrissi in collaboration with Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares. Arabic font used as basis for the logo is TheMix Arabic, designed by Lucas de Groot and Mouneer Al-Shaarani).

We are celebrating the opening of El HEMA in conjunction with the Khatt, Kufi & Kaffia | Symposium on Arabic Visual Culture. At the symposium, 5 new Arabic fonts will be presented. The fonts are a result of a special collaboration of Dutch and Arabic typographers which was organized by the Khatt Foundation. That is also when the book Typographic Matchmaking will be publicly presented and released. In that book, Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFares will describe the intercultural collaboration that led to the new letters and new insights into Arabic type design.

Of course El Hema will mostly use these fonts!

El Hema does not belong to the Dutch HEMA B.V. nor any other store.

For more infromation about this project you can visit the Mediamatic site.