TERRAFORMA

Tamar Hadechian X MULLER INDUSTRIES – We Design Beirut

Abroyan Factory | Beirut, Lebanon 2025

Installation design for ‘Material Memory’ terracotta series

This exhibition takes place in the teinturerie of Abroyan: a longitudinal space with wooden floors, high ceilings, and a rhythm of repetitive windows and beams that carry the memory of its industrial past. Once a place of dyeing, drying, and transformation, the room with its raised wooden floors that once saw a dance of water and air now becomes the stage for a further dialogue between earth and fire, glass and clay, industry and craft.

On one side, a live glassblowing installation brings the act of making into the exhibition itself. Artisans transform molten sand into vessels and forms conjured through fire and breath. On the other, an artist installation explores clay through the five elements; water, earth, air, fire, and ether, the human touch, to create works that move between the industrial and the handmade.

Unifying the two is TERRAFORMA, a large-scale installation made from the architectural and everyday terracotta products of MULLER Industries. Floor tiles, roof tiles, claustra, and wares are assembled into a vibrant, playful surface; part carpet, part manufactured geology. It begins as an ordered floor-cover beneath the glassblowing furnace and workstations, and gradually morphs into a seemingly chaotic field of unexpected patterns and textures, a pixelated landscape that runs across the room and culminates in the emergence of an earthenware garden, where the properties of the material and industrial geometries give rise to surprising forms through sculptural clay works.