Al-Haneen Miskeen
Ali Waqar
Al-Haneen Miskeen is a body of work that explores our relationship to nostalgia and how it can be visualized, recorded, and shared. It looks at how cultural ephemera from our past can shape our present and inform our future.
Beginning from an interest in the highly transformative time period of the Omani Renaissance, the project investigates archiving artistic and cultural details of landmarks erected during the 1980s, when the renaissance was at its peak. Now these landmarks serve as symbols of a bygone era, reminding us of how much the world around them has changed.
To emphasize this distinction between past and present, a video comparison of driving footage from the time period and today creates moments of contrast that elicit feelings of amazement and reflection at how much things have changed. To better understand these feelings, a visual and interview-based study was performed to explore how peoples’ nostalgia manifests and what connotations these memories hold.
The final output of the project is a publication that discusses all of the methods of designing in question, namely; visualizing, recording, and sharing. It uses the voices of Omani youth to delve into their relationships to nostalgia and how its many forms, illustrated in this project, has affected them.