“As part of the Sandberg Instituut Graduation Exhibition, Fayyad decided to move the screen-printing machine from Beirut and display it, alongside a five-minute video, titled Why are we celebrating (2022), where she elaborates on and communes with those euphoric—and, at times, terror-stricken—days of Lebanon’s uprising, as well as its devastating aftermath, leading up to her reaching Amsterdam’s quieter landscape of canals and crooked townhouses. The designer could have strictly relied on the machine’s ominous, deracinated attendance to form a self-reliant statement about loss and remembrance. However, despite the fact that Fayyad’s practice is heavily informed by archaic forms and systems, there’s a scrupulous will on her part to eschew the traps of nostalgia. Instead, the machine has been repurposed to print talismans—objects ascribed with magical powers and which tend to be carried on someone in manifold ways.” Excerpt from an essay on Farah Fayyad by Edwin Nasr