DUA EXPRESS is an amalgamation of the Arab world’s indigenous forms of speculative fiction, and thus reclaims a transgenerational power for imagining the seemingly impossible. In its first edition, the deck comprises 78 bilingual cards containing common words and themes that have been extracted from a treasure trove of ancestral prayers—such as fate, safety, and fortune.
The deck is designed for intuitive use and serves as a versatile tool for daily guidance, mutual storytelling, time travel, as well as personal and collective manifestation.
Since 2012, Raafat Majzoub has been writing an ‘alternative autobiography of another Arab world’, titled The Perfumed Garden. It is a work of Social Sci-fi that speculates an alternative Arab world beyond the region’s insecurity and reifies it through sculptural and performative interventions, inviting the viewer to enjoy and co-create it.
A pivotal setting from The Perfumed Garden is The Institute for Worldmaking, a university campus with several departments and labs that focus on experimenting with and prototyping cultural practices. In this other world, DUA EXPRESS is published by The Institute for Worldmaking’s “Lab for Mythology and Alternative Intelligence”.
Production team: Raafat Majzoub, Carl Barrett, Salem Shamieh, and Hajj Omran.
Raafat Majzoub is an architect, artist, writer, and cultural strategist. His work focuses on fiction, speculation, and collaborative learning. He is the director of The Khan: The Arab Association for Prototyping Cultural Practices where he explores a collective artisanship of truth, and builds an alternative Arab world for himself and his friends.