2026 forthcoming Doha Design Biennale - CHARLOTTE RODENBERG

Sacred Ecologies: Between Land and Sea

Project Summary In this project, I explore the oasis as both a physical refuge and a cultural system of care. Drawing from nomadic saddle structures and collaborative craft traditions, I work alongside textile artisans and woodcrafters to create a small collection of shelters and seating objects shaped through shared labor and knowledge exchange. These forms reference vernacular architectures designed for mobility, resilience, and gathering, while responding to contemporary ecological urgencies specific to Qatar’s landscape.
Materials The materials themselves carry memory and meaning. Wool and wood—long tied to nomadic life and regional craft traditions—form both the physical and conceptual backbone of the work. Their warmth, grain, and resistance invite touch, slowing the body down and encouraging a sensory way of knowing. Salvaged palm-leaf ropes are integrated into the structures as both support and symbol, echoing the native landscape and traditional building methods rooted in oasis life. Together, these materials create a tactile connection between body, land, and inherited craft knowledge.
Collaboration Collaboration is central to the project. Making is framed as an ethical practice rooted in reciprocity, care, and collective responsibility. By working closely with a diverse community of textile artisans and woodcrafters, the project becomes a space for exchange—where techniques, stories, and lived experiences shape the final forms. The objects are not authored alone; they are built through dialogue and shared attention.
Community Engagement This project invites interaction. By encouraging visitors to sit, gather, and rest within and around the shelters, the work asks how refuge is constructed—socially, ecologically, and materially. Just as coral reefs protect Qatar’s coastlines by buffering erosion, mitigating flooding, and sustaining fragile ecosystems, these structures propose protection through accumulation, interdependence, and care.
Outcome These structures articulate the Land and Sea Oases as lived systems of refuge, translating desert and coastal protection into saddle and tent inspired forms designed for environmental reflection and critical dialog. The Sea Oasis draws from Qatar’s resilient coral reefs, emphasizing protection through interdependence, accumulation, and continual repair. In parallel, the Land Oasis foregrounds endurance and wayfinding, attending to the quiet infrastructures of care that make survival possible across arid terrain. Each saddle shelter is constructed with a wooden saddle inspired frame, wrapped in tassels, needlepoint and tufted textile surfaces. The Land Oasis incorporates map like markings that reference pathways, cultivated plots, and the often unseen movement of water, labor, and knowledge that sustains oasis life. These markings function less as illustration and more as orientation, tracing routes and boundaries that register the layered ecological and human relationships required to keep ground inhabitable. The Sea Oasis textile highlights coral biodiversity through illustrative motifs and a glitch aesthetic that gestures toward world building game culture, suggesting that habitat protection is not a distant spectacle but an enacted role, one we repeatedly assume through choice, attention, and care. Together, the shelters propose protection as circular rather than one directional. The oasis shelters its inhabitants, yet this refuge depends on reciprocal responsibility and maintenance. By inviting visitors to sit, gather, and rest within and around the forms, the work frames touch as a mode of reflection on labor, reciprocity, and interdependence. The shelters ask not only to be seen, but to be engaged with.