The Exquisite Pearl

In addition to designing and playing mini golf, our role at the 2015 Tasmeem Festival was also as speakers and workshop leaders. For four days we directed a workshop titled Hole-in-One: Exquisite Corpse Mini Golf. The original idea was to have students prototype three different holes in three days that all of them got to build and edit. But we decided that it’d be more fun to use three days to build one final, more developed hole to finish off the course the students had worked so hard to make last fall.

So we arrived in Doha with a design, a blank canvas really, that our workshop participants could help build, edit and alter as they saw fit. Our design was inspired by the Pearl Monument on Doha’s Corniche. We also added in a classic jump, as this was something none of the other holes incorporated. Just a few hours into Day 1 of the workshop and our students had decided they wanted to turn the Doha skyline into monster versions of their professors (perfectly tying into traditional exquisite corpse games), who just so happened to be the four Tasmeem Co-Chairs.

This design of this hole challenged players to land the ball in the small cup (centered in the open clamshell) and thus encouraged players to try again and again. This was very difficult to accomplish, but totally achievable, making it super fun and rewarding. Check out the official archive of our workshop here!