During my residency at VCUQ, I had collaborative sessions with the students and professors alongside lectures and workshops. In one of them, we decided to conduct fieldwork exploring two topics:
- What happens to discarded materials in Qatar?
- Where can craft and handwork still be found in a country with such a highly accelerated transition to a consumerist economy?
During the residency, I heard an anecdote that the Qatari government had invested in building recycling plants only to find later that they were unfeasible. There would be, after all, no point in trying to sell recycled materials where manufacturing plants are rare, and shipping such materials abroad wouldn't make sense economically. I didn't find proper proof of any of that and assume that things may have changed afterwards. Still, I discussed with the students about what they thought happened to the things they discarded every day. Nobody had a clear idea. Someone then said they had heard (or seen on Google Maps, I'm not sure) about places in the desert where cars and tires were discarded. That was our first venture in fieldwork, and did we find dumpsites as big as whole neighbourhoods in the middle of nowhere, half-covered in sand. Here's my view of what we collected: Junk in the Desert.
For the other topic, we went looking for wood-workers, shoe repairers, tailors, and other craft-based professionals that could give clues of the skills also present in repair cultures. We found aging workers and little inter-generational knowledge sharing. Most of those craftsmen (all men indeed) had lived in Qatar for decades, and decided not to pass along their skills to their children. One said "my son is better off, he drives a limousine". Another one said "youngsters are not interested in this kind of work". Some of them still had well-maintained tools and equipment they purchased when first arriving in the country - one of them reportedly 35 years earlier. I only have a handful of pictures from that day. Fortunately, the students brought proper cameras. Some of their photos can be seen in the draft publication repair culture.