Crops, water, land, food. Four things that seem reasonably well behaved when written down. Land stays under the word “land.” Water fits comfortably into five letters. Food is still outside your body. Nothing has happened yet.

Give the list a little time and the categories begin to interfere with one another. Crops need water and land. They become food. The food goes into people, who have further requirements. There are questions of ownership, labor, distribution, appetite. A very large amount of administration for something that begins by growing out of the ground.

Tamawuj is the rising and falling of waves. For Sharjah Biennial 13, the bilingual website and identity take that movement into the typography. The letters rise and fall while the site gathers research and publishing around those four themes. Four short words, with a steadily expanding amount of material between them.

Water is particularly unhelpful in keeping them apart. It is inside the crop, beside the land, in the food, coming down from somewhere else.