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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...
...and on we go...
...with Naomi Green
I first brought the carpet to the banks of the Six Mile Water in Antrim, placing it beside a brick from one of the now-demolished mills that once lined the river. For generations, the water here powered mills connected to linen, flax and other industries, part of a much longer history of making and weaving in this area.
But the river also speaks to movement. The Six Mile Water valley has been shaped by people arriving and settling here over centuries, including the movement of Scottish settlers into County Antrim in the seventeenth century. The river itself connected Antrim to Lough Neagh and to wider networks of movement and trade.
Bringing the carpet here brought these histories together for me: different traditions of weaving, different movements of people, and the ways in which both become part of the places in which people eventually make their lives. The old mill brick beside the carpet is a small reminder that what we now think of as local heritage was itself made through movement, exchange and change.
It was spring when I began the project, and there was a sense of hope to it. I was already planning to bring the carpet to an event in June that was particularly important to me: an interfaith and intercultural gathering to mark the installation of a memorial stone for sailors I had discovered during my research, buried in unmarked plots in Belfast City Cemetery and largely forgotten for almost a century However, before then its next journey was to Clonard Monastery in West Belfast.
Clonard has long been an important site of peacebuilding and reconciliation in Northern Ireland. There the carpet was joined by Fr Stephen Thomas, a Redemptorist priest from Kerala in the south of India, alongside Fr Ciaran O’Callaghan and Ed Petersen from Clonard and representatives of Belfast’s Jewish, Muslim and Protestant Christian communities. It seemed an appropriate place to reflect on migration, sanctuary and shared heritage, and on the different ways people come to make a home here.
Then, in June, the context changed dramatically.
Northern Ireland experienced serious racist and Islamophobic violence, with minority and Muslim families and institutions directly targeted. Homes were attacked, families fled and events were cancelled. The sense of hope that had accompanied the carpet in the spring was much harder to hold onto. The event I had intended the carpet to be part of was also postponed.
In August, Belfast Mela offered some hope again. For a few days, the cultures and communities that make up Belfast were visible across the city in a very different way. Bringing the carpet there after the violence of the previous months felt important. It did not erase what had happened, but it was another part of the story of Belfast: one in which migration, culture and difference are not simply tolerated, but are part of the city itself.
Finally, two months later than planned, the memorial I had been working towards was installed at Belfast City Cemetery. Its launch was much smaller than originally intended, but the carpet had finally arrived where I had always planned for it to be.
The stone remembers eleven Muslim men known to have been buried in the cemetery between the 1920s and 1940s, most of them lascars, international seafarers who worked aboard merchant ships and whose lives connected Belfast to ports across Asia, Africa and beyond. They came to Belfast through the same global networks of movement, labour and trade that helped build the city, yet their graves remained unmarked and their presence largely absent from its remembered history.
By the time I placed the carpet beside their memorial, it meant something slightly different from what I had imagined in the spring. Over those months it had travelled through places connected with industry and migration, faith and peacebuilding, and the celebration of Belfast’s contemporary diversity. It had also travelled through a summer in which the belonging and safety of minority communities had been very publicly challenged.
The memorial brought the journey back to something I had been thinking about throughout the project. Migration is often discussed in Northern Ireland as though it is recent, or as though migrants sit somewhere outside the history of this place. Yet people have always moved: to work, to trade, because of conflict, empire, opportunity or circumstance. Some stayed and some moved on. Some, like the seafarers buried in Belfast City Cemetery, died here far from the places in which they were born.
Their stories are not separate from Belfast’s history. They are part of it. Perhaps, after this particular summer, marking that presence mattered even more than I had imagined when the carpet’s journey began.
The journey begins...
...with Jenny Goldmann
When the fragment arrived, I turned it over in my hands and thought about the wonderful places it had been. It was that same day that I found out I was pregnant with my first child.
So then, life interrupted.
In the whirlwind of pregnancy and childbirth — the long nights, the waiting, the astonishment of becoming a mother — I forgot about the fragment for a while. Only now, with my daughter asleep beside me, do I return to it.
She has just entered the world, and already her life is threaded with many places. She will hold four passports. She will grow up on a small Spanish island off the coast of Africa. She will hear different languages at the dinner table. Her lullabies will carry more than one accent. Her sense of “home” will not be singular — it will be layered.
Holding this fragment now, I think about what culture really means. It is not something fixed or fragile. It is something woven — strand by strand — through movement, exchange, and coexistence. A carpet does not lose its integrity because it is made of many colors. It becomes richer.
Europe, for me, is like that. Complex, imperfect, sometimes loud and contradictory — but profoundly shaped by centuries of cultural crossings. I am deeply grateful to have the opportunity to live in a place where borders can be bridges, where identities can overlap, where my daughter’s multiplicity is not an exception but part of a long story of exchange.
This fragment once belonged to a whole. Now it travels independently, gathering new meaning in each home it visits. I hope that my daughter will do the same — carrying with her the places she comes from, and adding her own threads to the pattern.
As I photographed it beneath the banana leaves — roots deep in volcanic soil, leaves reaching outward — I realised that this is what I want for her: strong roots, wide horizons.
Culture is not something we inherit untouched.
It is something we continue.
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.
Creating a carpet
A 17th-century Caucasian carpet, burned by an incendiary bomb during the Second World War, serves as the model for a replica, woven in 2022 by a family in Rajasthan, India. Over 2.3 million knots later, it is being sent out into the world in 100 fragments. This is the story of how it came to be.
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?
