EXPO 2025: THREADS OF TIME

DESIGN: Shifa Zghoul and Ahmad Jubra

FABRICATION: Daiko Nitten

Jordan may be small, but its impact on the world is huge. It's home to several Dead Sea Scroll discoveries, and archaeologists found there the oldest-known evidence of bread-baking — about 14,000 years old, predating by far the arrival of agriculture. In the same way, the Jordan pavilion at Expo 2025 measured a modest 300 square meters but offered an experience rivaling those that were more than 10 times its size with budgets to match. Designed by architects Shifa Zghoul and Ahmad Jubra with the theme “Weaving Possibilities,” the pavilion's exterior set the tone with a kinetic aluminum facade inspired by the red-and-white Jordanian shemagh, the traditional headdress. Inside, instead of the expected array of travel posters and tchotchkes a diminutive country often outfits its pavilion with at a World Expo, visitors discovered an experience rich in history and aesthetics.

Naoki Kusumi, a Japanese artist renowned for his sublime mastery of plaster, created a red mud wall that evoked Jordan's ancient rose-red city of Petra. Using a variety of natural earth pigments and layered-plaster techniques, Kusumi created a tactile surface suggestive of Petra's streaked rock formations and the surrounding desert's ever-shifting sands. Although only a few months old, the wall could have been a contemporary of the Magi or the Caesars. The journey through Jordan continued with an installation by textile artist Ishraq Zraikat. Called “Passage,” the weaving's horizontal light stripes on dark brown and black goat hair referred to the Bedouin tent, a “house without a door” that symbolizes Arab hospitality. Across from it was the Stone Piano (aka Desert Soundscape). Designed by architect/artist/geologist Ammar Khammash, it consisted of a series of 500-million-year-old limestone blocks that were transformed into a unique xylophone so ancient it came from a time when the day was only around 22 hours long. The limestone wasn't carved to make the correct tone. Instead, each fossil was tested in the desert to see what note it would sound. When visitors struck the blocks with a mallet, the ethereal sounds were visually translated into notes projected on “Strata,” another Zraikat weaving above.

The journey ended at the Theater of Civilizations, where visitors were asked to slip off their shoes and socks and step into the circular space where they could rest on 22 tons of red sand shipped in from the Wadi Rum. Once people sat, the lights dimmed and the stars came out over the fabled sandy wilderness on a 360-degree projection screen, and a live narrator introduced the natural magic of the UNESCO Heritage site in multiple languages. Even when the show ended, people lingered as if moving would break the spell of being in an enchanted land. “If you want to keep people in your pavilion,” joked Zghoul, who also served as the Jordan's commissioner general for the pavilion, “take their shoes.” However, stealing footwear wasn't necessary in a pavilion every bit the marvel that ancient cities and legendary deserts are.