~Comforts~
This piece was inspired by an Iranian-American friend in the light of the protests in Iran. While the protesting in general is important to follow, it is also important to remember the intimately human aspects of a culture that are rarely captured by the news at large. I asked her what fond memories she had of her country that stood out in her mind.
She said: Persian rugs, saffron, and drinking tea out of tiny glasses <3
Woman, Life, Freedom!
Iranian-Azerbaijani rug, circa. 1965 (designed by Jafar Mujiri, commissioned by the Tudeh Party of Iran) - Celebrating the successes of Soviet space travel.
Persian spatial culture is closely bound up with gardens as ‘built environments’, with precise landscape and architectural features, and is reflected in the production of carpets, from the grid-like Chahar Bagh ‘garden carpets’ to prayer rugs. Persian prayer rugs represent openings, doors and gateways towards the garden, featuring decorated arches supported by carefully designed columns, in which the foliage rooted in the ground connects symbolically to the sky.
Alessandra Covini, The Carpet and the Territory, MacGuffin Magazine, Issue No. 9, The Rug
Mezquitas de Puerto Rico is an ongoing collaboration between Alia Farid and Jesús "Bubu" Negrón on the representation of Islam in the Caribbean. Renderings/depictions have so far resulted in a series of prayer rugs of mosques in the Puerto Rican towns of Hatillo, Vega Alta, Fajardo, Rio Piedras, and Ponce, and postcards of the same places. For the carpet-kilims series, the mosques were photographed in the spring of 2013 and later interpreted by weavers from Mashhad, Iran.