April 2026 | With Adrian Pepe

I met Adrian in Beirut a little less than a decade ago. Our common close friend Nada Debs introduced us.

Adrian is originally from Honduras. He was one of several foreigners whose paths I had crossed in Lebanon and who made me wonder why I wasn’t myself living there. He carried himself remarkably gracefully. With social ease and yogi athletic skills, Adrian had a lot going for himself. So much so that I wondered exactly how he had landed in Beirut and why he had decided to settle there, the city where I was born, capital of my mother’s homeland where I had really never lived. The traumatic stigma of the Lebanese war I had inherited all the way from Paris through media, my mother and these dreaded phone calls with the long rings, was probably to blame.

In 2024 the first and memorable Doha Arab Design Now Biennale featured an installation of my work. Our curator Rana Beiruti had expertly decided to place my table and bookshelf right beside a large textile mural encased under plexiglass resin which captivated attention and complimented my Egyptian alabaster works. On a basic aesthetic level, the cloudy white fur of what seemed to be stitched pieces of golden inner skin encased in a massive plexiglass box, emanated a hypnotic quality and dialogued harmoniously with the honed-surfaced-desert-tones and intuitive form of my work.

After the first day of the Biennial, I connected the dots and realized that the mural artwork was Adrian’s creation. I found out that after years of practice and various exhibitions around the world, he had become an award-winning fiber artist with complex layers of skill, technique and meaning to his work. Much like myself he had carved a path of his own where his creative voice could express itself in a world often too concerned with labels.
Adrian holds a bachelor’s degree in Architecture and a master’s degree in Design for Sustainability from Savannah College of Art and Design.
With the second Doha Biennial approaching (in theory at least, since the current political climate hangs a Damocles sword above our heads), I thought it was a good time to invite Adrian in my diary and try to create more precious bridges between the bubbles in which we all live.

Hello Adrian! Where are you in these crazy revolting times?
I’m in Lebanon; I place I understand today as a second home.

Living here has had a significant impact on my practice. The work is deeply tied to place, it becomes a tool for exploration, a way of building a growing registry of objects that hold my findings, interpretations, misunderstandings, and shifts in perception as I layer myself into the environment.

Over the past years, Lebanon has been in constant confrontation, turmoil, collapse, regeneration. So much has been lost, and what remains is a raw sense of humanity that cuts across class, religion, race, ethnicity, and identity.

Staying comes with a sense of responsibility, a commitment to the place and how it continues to change.

From reading the interviews you’ve previously given, I gathered that you prefer to talk about the craft of your work rather than your personal life. I often like to get into a little bit of background information though, so can I please ask a 3-in1 question to elaborate on my introduction’s commentaries before we get into your creative work? (Even though I believe that being born, growing up and traveling IS creative work). Where were you born, where did you grow up and how did you end up in Beirut?
Long story.

I was born in La Ceiba, a Caribbean town in Honduras. I left when I was sixteen for a cultural exchange in the Netherlands, and since then I’ve mostly lived as a foreigner, moving between places.

Lebanon is the place I’ve lived the longest, but many identities formed elsewhere too: in the United States where I studied, in South America and Sub-Saharan Africa where I worked. Being in constant movement sharpens your sense of self. You’re defined in relation to others. I came to Lebanon through a friend, Danya Ahmed. She had moved here and invited me. Through her I met Bokja’s founders, Huda Baroudi and Maria Hibri, and began working with them early on.

So where am I from? Is it where I was born, where my family is from, where I’ve stayed the longest? They say the body replaces all its cells every seven years. It’s not entirely true, some remain. The eyes, parts of the nervous system, the heart.

Was there anything in your life prior to developing your work with fibers and textile that pre-disposed you to following such a path? Not that it adds or removes anything from the expertise, research and poetic quality I have learned to appreciate in what you do.

I had an early sensitivity to aesthetics, but no clear direction. I moved through materials like wood, metal, clay. Hard surfaces, navigating between materials and places. Textiles came later, and when they did, something shifted. They felt intimate, familiar. We are born into textiles, and in textiles we leave.Wool, especially, has a kind of agency, responding to pressure, moisture, touch; it resists, absorbs, shifts. Working with it feels like entering into dialogue with something that carries its own memory. I’m drawn to textiles because they exist in that in-between space, between surface and structure, touch and meaning, object and witness. They’re never neutral.

I’m projecting here but sometimes I think of stone and Egypt more as vessels used to tell a personal story for the world to hopefully take from which is hopefully what strong creative work and approaches to Design can do. Is there a little bit of that in your investing the realm of fibers? What brought you to it?

With natural fibers, there’s already a narrative embedded.

They carry the life of the plant or animal. I don’t impose a story so much as enter into one that’s already there. The work becomes a way of tracing relationships between species, between bodies, between systems that have coexisted for millennia.

Lately it feels like a kind of rural return. In an increasingly abstract world, there’s a pull toward these origin points, toward a re-encounter with material realities. A mentor once told me the past is the future. I think about that often.

You work through a unique approach that merges craft, performance and installation. Felting, spinning or stitching become symbolic acts where material, places, movement and memory find resonance and meaning. Before I get into a specific project. Is there a way to describe your approach generally or does it vary for each project?

I don’t separate making from thinking.

Felting, spinning, stitching, these gestures are the work.

Each project shifts depending on the material and context, but the approach stays close to process. It’s less about producing an object and more about entering a set of conditions and staying with them long enough for something to emerge. The word material comes from mater—mother. I think of matter as a kind of maternal archive, something that carries memory and change.

One of your most representative works in my view was displayed at NIKA project space in Dubai in 2024 where a massive woolen piece of textile that once covered a damaged heritage Beirut building was used to reveal a variety of connections: Human and animal, material and ethereal, environmental and philosophical to only name a few. The name of the installation was particularly poetic: A Shroud Is A Cloth. You actually wrapped your naked body in the fabric. Can you take us into you your recollection of that installation? How it came about, what it meant to you and how it was received?

The work began at Villa des Palmes in Beirut, a building heavily damaged by the port explosion. I wrapped it in wool, almost like giving it a provisional skin.

That gesture came from observing the city, how buildings under repair are covered in textiles. Green mesh, blue tarps, jute. These temporary mantles appear during moments of transition. I became interested in that state, something suspended between use and abandonment.

The wool used for this project was sourced locally from Awassi sheep, a material, often discarded, and hand-felted into a large textile. It became a surface of accumulation that absorbed dust, debris, atmosphere. In wrapping the building, the work mirrored the vulnerability of bodies and structures, and the labor required to sustain them. Later, in the gallery, it shifted into something else: an artifact, a record. But the core question remained: what does it mean to extend gestures of care, protection, or mourning beyond the human body?

The current climate in Lebanon is unbelievably challenging. The Lebanese people seem endlessly and repeatedly obliged to find resilience and adaptability through exceptionally difficult and unfair realities. Do these circumstances affect your work? I imagine that Lebanon feels home to you considering how long you’ve lived there but do you get to a point where things become too intense to inspire a creative gesture?

Of course.

There are frictions here, between time periods, political realities, material conditions, that push toward deeper questions about how we inhabit the world.

Lebanon is a place of proximity. Opposing forces coexist closely, and that tension sharpens awareness.

Living through the port explosion, the collapse of systems, and ongoing violence, there’s a collective exhaustion, but also a heightened sensitivity; everything becomes more urgent, more raw.

There are moments of paralysis. Moments where it feels impossible to move, to produce, to project forward.

But continuing to work, however modestly, becomes a form of resistance in the insistence of continuity.

And at the same time, what sustains that continuity is civil society. The informal networks, the gestures of support, the ways people show up for one another despite everything. There’s a kind of quiet infrastructure there that holds things together.

It’s not that these conditions produce more work. They change how you are with it.

Is there another creative highlight you particularly cherish and if yes can you elaborate?

Utility of Being, at the Old Municipal Slaughterhouse in Sharjah.
The architecture struck me immediately: hooks, drains, tiled surfaces. Efficient, controlled, stripped of ritual. I wanted to reintroduce presence into that space. I worked with reclaimed sheepskins, stitched into pneumatic bodies, inflated and suspended. Almost architectural forms, column-like, totemic, occupying the same volume where slaughter once occurred. As they filled with air, they expanded into space like a blowfish, defensive, asserting themselves, pushing back against an invisible pressure. Breathing, shifting, holding their ground. The work reinserted a sense of acknowledgment into a system built for speed and detachment. At the closing, Habban players activated the space. The sound, both festive and somber, moved through the forms, bringing back a sense of ceremony into a system designed to remove it.

There’s a physicality in your work that I personally connect to your astute yoga practice. Do you see a connection there? If yes do you still practice yoga and is still an important element in your life?

Yes, though not in a direct way.

Yoga trained attention: breath, duration, endurance. Those same qualities enter the work. It’s also about re-sensitizing the body in a world that increasingly abstracts us. Becoming aware of scale, how small and how expansive we are at once.

I remember reading Lawrence Joseph Henderson years ago (a physiologist and biochemist) who wrote about how life depends on shared chemical processes. He speaks about breath as the way we are connected to our surroundings:

“The independence of the individual is an illusion; in the process of respiration we are all united, for the atmosphere is one.” I often recall that passage. The questions that arise through an embodied practice like yoga are the same ones that guide the work: attention, relation, awareness.

Can you share something you’re currently excited to be working on?

Color systems, through vegetal indigo. Indigo appears across many regions like Africa, Asia, the Americas. It carries histories of trade, labor, symbolism. In this region, it’s associated with protection, with deflecting the evil eye. A kind of spiritual material defense. I’ve been keeping indigo close lately, experimenting with it alongside other materials. Creating strange hybrids that speak to a shared condition, between plant and animal, body and surface, protection and exposure.

What would you like us to wish you?
The capacity to act within uncertainty.

RAPID ROUND:

Name a material

Catgut thread

Name a plant

Indigofera suffructosa

Name a landscape

Desert

Name a country

Uzbekistan

Name an animal

Awassi sheep