‘Hybrid Exhalations’
As Milan Design Week 2025 draws to a close, KHAMSA sits down with Palestinian architect, visual artist, and researcher Dima Srouji for a closer look at Gucci’s exhibition, Bamboo Encounters. Held at Milan’s Chiostri di San Simpliciano and curated by 2050+ and its founder Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, the exhibition pays homage to the House’s enduring legacy with bamboo—reimagining the iconic material through the lens of contemporary design.
Born in Nazareth in 1990, Srouji’s multidisciplinary practice explores the cultural and political dimensions of land, heritage, and displacement, with a particular focus on the Middle East and Palestine. In Hybrid Exhalation, part of Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters, she continues her practice of storytelling through objects and intertwines the methodical process of bamboo craftsmanship with lightweight glass. Her work breathes new life into traditional forms, combining the fast-paced with the slow-paced, transforming them into vessels of memory and the present.
All images are courtesy of Gucci.
To learn more about the entire exhibition, click here.
١. Your work often explores the emotional weight of heritage and place—how did you approach translating that into bamboo for Gucci | Bamboo Encounters?
My process always begins with digging into the hidden layers of the material. In the case of bamboo, I wanted to understand its legacy as a material of cultural production. I found a book at the Royal College of art library on Japanese bamboo baskets from the 1980s that I fell in love with. The project started to unfold from the book. I began collecting found baskets from all over the world and imagined the artisans behind them and wanted to include the material I’ve been intimate with for the last ten years- hand blown glass from home. The Palestinian masters I’ve been working with also come with layers of tradition. You can see those layers in how they make the glass come to life.
٢. What narratives or memories did the material evoke for you?
The relationship to time and slowness in this project is really important. The weaving of glass and bamboo together in my studio allowed me to appreciate the slowness and meditative practice of basketry.
In such an accelerated and noisy, and dark world especially now as a Palestinian, it was necessary for me to experience a space of silence and slowness that produced joy rather than sorrow.
٣. Your projects often involve collaboration across disciplines—archaeology, glassblowing, and sound design. How did working with Gucci, a fashion house, shift or expand that creative dialogue?
The design process has always been interdisciplinary and multi scalar for me. There are core foundations that connect all of the design disciplines together formally in terms of composition light texture tones on one end. The academic end brings out preexisting conditions embedded in the objects. I use theory to unfold that constellations of stories.
The trick and the most fun part of the project is identifying the constellation of connections between the language and the form. Fashion has always done both incredibly well. Fashion houses have to have a creative vision a clarity of story that must carry through in the form as well. This is fundamental to a successful project and it cannot be done without interdisciplinary and interscalar methods and collaboration. This project gave me insight into how a large luxury brand like Gucci are still grounded in their relationship to archives – their own and the materials they engage with. I found that my process was in fact not so different from Gucci’s.
٤. From Venice to Sharjah to Shanghai, your work have traveled far. How does exhibiting at a design event like Salone del Mobile differ from showing in a museum or biennale setting?
In Salone most of the time the objects are understood and displayed as products and consumed on the scale of the commodity. What 2050+ did for Gucci is a unique moment in this context. The project tactfully separates refinement from objects. The installations and sculptures are refined yet not consumed as commodities. In that sense this collection of works fit both in the context of a museum as well as a design week and straddle the two simultaneously. It’s important to push the boundaries of design fairs not to fall back to the comfort of consumption.
