Collaborations and Partners

We collaborate with artists and artisans across the world , from established practitioners to self-taught makers and generational craftspeople. Each carries a distinct language of making, shaped by memory, place, and inheritance.

In Pakistan, our work spans a continuum of contemporary and traditional craft, from
graduates of the National College of Arts, Lahore, to artisans whose knowledge is passed down through family lineages outside formal institutions. Together, they reflect a living landscape of making.

Among them is Rizwan Saeed, a fresco and mosaic artist with over fifteen years of
experience restoring UNESCO-recognised heritage sites, where technique itself becomes history. In Multan, seventh-generation Kashigars continue the city's blue tile tradition, their lineage tied to the restoration of the 14th-century Tomb of Shah Rukn-e-Alam. This ecosystem also includes home-based women artisans and endangered craft lineages, handwoven textiles, embroidery, and Ajrak dyeing , practices that carry centuries of knowledge and remain increasingly fragile today.    

Across the Arab world and the wider region, we engage with enduring craft traditions shaped over generations. From Cairo comes Mr. Abdul, a third-generation tentmaker sustaining one of the world's oldest and most endangered textile practices, with a piece permanently on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Our collaborations also extend to Afghan refugee artisans based in Pakistan, and to Palestinian businesses preserving traditions shaped by displacement, resilience, and continuity.

From the Levant, and across centuries of material culture, we draw on early traditions such as soap making. Aleppo soap is among the oldest and most enduring craft practices in the region, refined through generations of use and necessity.

Our vintage lines, sourced from Afghanistan, the Levant, the UK, and South Asia, are not
collections of the past but continuations of it reinterpreted from archival textiles and objects that carry memory, time, and lineage.

At Threads and Rivers, heritage is presence carried forward through the hands that continue to make.