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This fragment is part of the "CulturalxCollabs - Weaving the Future" carpet.
Through the fragment we trace the journey of the fragment owners and their collabs as they explore, experiment and creatively advance socially relevant themes. Here is the fragment as we are sending it on this three and a half-year journey.
Follow this story to observe the transformations the fragment undergoes over the course of these years...
The Journey Begins...
...with Stephan Kurr
On December 14th, I received Fragment #56. It felt like one of those packages that arrive just before Christmas but aren't meant to be opened immediately. I opened it in the studio, where some inherited carpets were lying around. I placed the fragment among them.
During the Christmas season, as a child, I used to sit or lie on the living room carpet and play, something I never did for the rest of the year. Outside, it was cold, and the patterns of the carpet formed my play maps.
In the Museum of European Cultures, I look at carpet beaters. I find a box full of snippets, remnants of collages. I wonder if I should tell a story, create a comic from all these remnants. The carpet fragment gets scanned and reprinted at a 1:1 scale at the copy shop. If you fold the sheet in the middle, it could make a nice format.
I imagine the story of this carpet, the war that burned a new pattern into it. This makes the carpet special, among all the carpets in the museum. This carpet probably has many lives you can imagine: as a floor carpet, with children playing on it, then sold, a new life on a museum wall, then bombs, another life, again in the museum, as a collection of fragments reminding us that something was lost and that there are people who want to preserve, supplement, and repair things so that they become whole again, or at least healed, or at least cared for.
This carpet today is very different from the one it was back then, when it was newly woven. This carpet today vividly tells the story of its destruction and of a wish. What wish? To continue telling? Does the carpet still tell something of its origin? Does it tell something of the Caucasus?
In 1989, I was in the Caucasus. The Soviet Union still existed. The night before my departure from Tbilisi to home, the mood shifted, tanks could be heard rolling, I peeked through the drawn curtains of the hotel room onto the street. Nothing was visible, and the next morning there was nothing left of the demonstrations for an independent Georgia. On the bus to the airport, the travelers murmured, "Will we be able to leave here?"
I have some slides of the demonstrations, I half-heartedly search for them in my archive. Or should I rather tell the story of my hike on the Cross Pass and the farmer who approached me, and since I understood nothing, I replied with "niet ruski", after which he invited me in, and we drank a lot together. All I understood was that the basis of our gathering was Stalin and Hitler; we drank to that, back then, you Stalin, me Hitler, several times, with strips of bacon. I stop looking for the slides; this story sounds too much like a movie to continue telling it, no pictures, I have my memories, others should make their own images.I cut the prints of the carpet fragment into strips, several times. Lay them next to and over each other, like pick-up sticks, like a drapery, interweave them, copy everything again, cut again; by now, it’s March. I discard the idea of the comic. No story, nothing linear, everything should overlap.
In a carpet, the image is formed point by point, accidents are mistakes, deviations from the predetermined pattern. Nevertheless, every carpet has many mistakes, a distance is off here, the repeat doesn’t quite align there, and a new thread with a slightly different color is introduced.
I try painting, today yellow, tomorrow red, painting like weaving, not knotting, not point by point. I want to provoke chance.
Someone tells me about an exhibition. I misunderstand the title, think it’s something about texts, no, textile, pronounced in English: "textile." No! "Text till when?" "Endless." It’s like a babble of voices, like textile, which thread comes to the fore, which holds the fabric together, what falls into the fold and cannot unfold?
A misunderstanding is a beautiful accident, the wrong pronunciation a different context, the wrong spelling a new meaning. I decide to embroider the duplicate, to introduce a new thread between the fabric and knots. What is the top and bottom of a carpet? In the photo on the homepage, Fragment #56 is almost exactly in the middle. In the photo, four people are sitting on the carpet and staring at Fragment #56 as if something were written there.
I think about how to embroider, make a plan, paint the started watercolors more densely, and painstakingly embroider until the end.
Front and Back
About the Project
The Museum for Islamic Art's project, #CulturalxCollabs - Weaving the future, celebrates the transformative power of cultural exchange and the shared threads that unite us all. All the things we love, have loved and will ever love come from cultural exchange, migration and diversity, or as we like to call it #CulturalxCollabs.
100 carpet fragments, cut from a replica of the iconic dragon carpet, will travel the world (delivered by DHL). The fragments will ignite #CulturalxCollabs with co-creators, inspiring human ingenuity, fostering community and ultimately demonstrating how cultural exchange enriches all our lives.
Follow #CulturalxCollabs on Instagram as the project unfolds...
...or learn more here
Weaving the Future
Join us on a journey with 100 carpet fragments as they travel around the world for three and a half years, finding temporary homes while bridging cultural boundaries, fostering worldwide community united by the power of human stories.
Fragment Journeys
100 carpet fragments part of the "CulturalxCollabs - Weaving the Future" project. Follow their journeys through the ever changing owners' over three and a half years.
Where is the Dragon?
The star of the "CulturalxCollabs - Weaving the Future" project is a so-called Caucasian dragon carpet from the 17th century. A dragon carpet - all well and good - but: where is the dragon?
