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EMERGING DESIGNERS OPEN CALL

Thank you for your interest in applying to We Design Beirut Edition 03, taking place May 26-30, 2027, with its theme titled "Love on the Mediterranean". Lebanon has always existed in dialogue with the Mediterranean. The sea has shaped not only how Lebanon builds and trades, but how it imagines and creates. We Design Beirut Edition 03 is a continuation of this dialogue, carrying forward a spirit of openness, exchange, and creative possibility.
This edition's Emerging Designer Exhibition titled "The Harvest" explores Mouneh through the lens of contemporary product design. The Harvest invites emerging designers to create a contemporary object inspired by Mouneh. Drawing from the tools, practices, and techniques associated with food preservation across Lebanon and the Mediterranean, participants are encouraged to explore new ways to empower the artisan and these traditions through product design.
The exhibition offers participants the opportunity to showcase and sell their work to collectors, design enthusiasts, and the wider public.
Please find below the curatorial statement and participation requirements for The Harvest. DEADLINE TO APPLY: AUGUST 15, 2026
Exhibition Curatorial Statement The Harvest
Curated by Claudia Skaff, Galal Mahmoud, and Karim Chaya
There is a rhythm to preservation that lives in the hands of those who came before us. The salting, the drying, the slow alchemy of sun and time. Jars lined on shelves like quiet archives. The scent of za'atar spread on rooftops. The weight of olives pressed into oil. This is mouneh; not merely a method, but a memory carried forward.
In Lebanon and across the Mediterranean, mouneh has always been more than sustenance. It is an act of faith in the future, performed in the present, rooted in the past. It is the grandmother's kitchen in September, thick with the smoke of makdous. It is the communal labor of preparing for winter; neighbors and cousins elbow to elbow, hands stained with pomegranate and grape. It is time stretched and folded into something that can be opened months later, shared at a table, and tasted as both nourishment and narrative.
We Design Beirut invites emerging designers in Lebanon to respond to this theme through object, tool, vessel, ritual, or system.
We ask: What does it mean to preserve, and what can design preserve?
Your work may address any aspect of the mouneh tradition and its contemporary resonances:
The making: tools for cutting, grinding, fermenting, curing
The storing: containers, seals, materials that protect and breathe
The cooking: instruments for preparation and transformation
The presenting: objects for serving, sharing, decorating and gathering
The ritual: systems, spaces, or experiences that frame the communal act
We welcome functional objects, speculative proposals, material experiments, and everything between.
What matters is engagement with the practice, its gestures, its values, its inheritance.
Mouneh teaches us that abundance is not about excess but about intention. That gathering is itself a form of love. In a time when so much feels precarious, we look to this tradition not with nostalgia but with urgency, asking what we carry forward, and how.
Submit your work. Join us at the table