Walking on the carpet and sitting on it, to take a rest, play, chat, eat, drink, sleep, pray. Anthropolically, almost all fundamental human activities have been experienced on carpets. Depending on its contemporary placement in the house or on the outdoor daybeds of the balcony, we still continue to do a great number of them. While we admire their nobly refined decorative features and find comfort in their functional purpose, Armenian historical carpets radiate until today an inner mystical force that very few scholars have tried to study. Could the highly rhythmic and abstracted flora-fauna compositions of Armenian historical carpets reveal a dormant philosophical foundation of the art of weaving?
Weavers have transformed the soft microarchitectures into a “window to the universe,” writes anthropologist Levon Abrahamyan. With the series of successive frames zooming in, weavers knotted mandala-like paradise gardens. While Armenia’s neighbouring Iran grounds its research of Persian carpets on strong analytical studies linked with the philosophy and principles of the Persian gardens, Armenia’s violent past history, territorial changes, population movements, and cultural losses didn’t allow such a continuous theoretical framework to form. The conversation with anthropologist Levon Abrahamyan will offer an opportunity to explore these questions and to learn from his past research on how the conception of the garden in Eastern cultures, natural or celestial, woven in wool or built in stone, from Armenia, Iran to Japan, reflects the artistic and spiritual ways of perceiving the world.
Free entrance with prior registration.
