Inside the concrete walls of my family’s home in Kuwait, I began to notice what was missing. Built during the height of the oil boom, the house felt still, not just in its silence, but in the absence of memory. Its surfaces were smooth and uniform, leaving little trace of what came before. But as I sat with family, listened to their stories, and pieced together fragments of our past, I began to understand what these walls had replaced.

The desert — al-bādiya — open and vast, was home to herders who spun wool into woven shelters. The villages — al-qurā — dense with palms and vegetation, where families wove fronds into fences and roofs. The coastal cities — al-mudun — centers of trade, where wood arrived by sea and was carved into beams and doors.

In all of these places, material wasn’t just a resource, it was a way of life. The land was a teacher, shaping identity.

But as oil wealth surged, so did a new architectural language, one defined by concrete. If we begin with the dictionary definition of colonization as “the act of sending people to live in and govern another country,” then Kuwait’s modernization through oil might be understood as a form of capitalist colonization, not by foreign occupation, but through the erasure of native materials, labor, and identity. Concrete became a tool of that shift: efficient, strong, but silent, void of cultural specificity, displacing the textures of place in favor of a homogenous, often Westernized, construction logic.

This is where material becomes memory in the face of cultural erasure. In Kuwait, names like Badawi, Qarawi, and Hadari are more than geographic labels. They are reflections of distinct ways of living shaped by the land and its materials. These names once described entire ways of life, deeply tied to specific environments. Today, they remain tied to people, but no longer to the lived environments that once gave them meaning.

I studied old footage of weaving, carving, stitching, and traced the process behind the material.

The blank concrete brick, in its pristine form, acts almost like a memorial: a symbol of an architecture that no longer reflects the lives or traditions it houses.

Memory bricks, starting with original materials like wool, palm, and wood, each carrying a story. In the second row, these materials are cast into concrete, embedding their textures. In the final row, traditional patterns reemerge on the surface of the concrete itself, memory becoming tactile again.

Traditional materials rupture through the concrete, disrupting its anonymity. These sculptures take on a battle-like quality where memory is not quietly preserved, but actively fights to reinsert itself into the present. This is not a return to the past, but a confrontation with the present. The bricks reclaim space for cultural identity within the very material that tried to erase it. The result is not uniform or seamless it is rough, uneven, and rooted in history.