Openness and collaborations

Dar al-Hiraf does not claim to reinvent the transmission of the crafts of Fez. It takes its place within a movement already at work — schools, workshops, heritage preservation associations, Moroccan and international institutions — each working according to its own vocation so that a skill does not die out for want of hands to receive it. The house remains open to that collaboration.

A place of immersion

Technique prolonged into a craft.

A knowledge without a successor

Masters and ṣāniʿ in the same workshop.

One more craftsman

To leave completes the transmission.

WHAT THE HOUSE OFFERS

A place where technique can extend

Schools and vocational training centres give a technique; Dar al-Hiraf offers the time and the setting in which that technique can become a craft. For young men already engaged in such a path, the house is a place of complete immersion — a craft learned not as an isolated skill, but within the rhythm of an entire life that gives it meaning.

THE MASTERS AND THEIR TOOLS

A knowledge in search of hands

For the masters whose knowledge has found no successor, the house can offer a living, equipped workshop, and ṣāniʿ ready to receive what would otherwise risk being lost. When a workshop closes for want of a successor, a place disappears, and often tools too, sometimes old ones, that can find a second life in hands trained to use them.

WHAT LEAVES THE HOUSE

To leave is not to break

For those who, after their formation at Dar al-Hiraf, choose to open their own workshop, the house does not regard this departure as a loss, but as the natural outcome of transmission: one more craftsman in the medina, trained, capable of standing on his own. To leave completes the meaning of transmission, rather than representing a loss.

WITH WHOM

With whom the house works

Schools and training centres

Technical curricula that find here a place to extend into duration and immersion.

Workshops and masters of the medina

A knowledge without a successor, a house capable of receiving it and keeping it alive.

Local associations

Those already engaged in transmission to the younger generations.

Institutions

Moroccan and international, whose mission is to support traditional craftsmanship.

A POINT OF REFERENCE

For Fez as much as for the Riad

What Dar al-Hiraf seeks to become does not benefit the house alone. A school of crafts that trains, that gathers endangered knowledge, that gives rise to new independent craftsmen, contributes to what has given Fez its reputation for centuries — and it is in this spirit that the house wishes to build, over time, lasting ties with those who share this ambition.

This ambition is not confined to Fez, since the arrangement the house puts to the test may be examined by those who would undertake a similar initiative in another city of the Kingdom.

Any school, workshop, association or institution interested in a collaboration, each according to its own vocation, is invited to write to us.

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