History is per se connected, linked in the truest sense.
And this weaving of stories of us, of our riches, of our
inspiration, of our sharing, but also of the conflicts and
the pain, all that is inside these objects.
We are here in the Museum of Islamic Art, which is in the Pergamon
Museum and we are happy that together with the Pergamon Altar and the
Ishtar Gate, we are actually telling the cultural history of the
Middle East. Star of this project "Cultural Collabs - Weaving
The Future" are these two carpets.
This is a dragon carpet from the Caucasus.
He actually tells the story of inspiration from China, the dragons
together with the floral, that is, with the floral elements, which
also flow in again and again from Ottoman, from Iranian and are also
abstracted here.
It really has been a valuable carpet - because in 1945 during a
bombing raid, it has been almost destroyed, actually destroyed.
If you copy a historical
object and copy it
beautifully, it's
usually dead.
So if we were to restore everything so that you don't even see that there was a loss,
then we would be falsifying our history a little bit.
This carpet is also a message for us.
The point is that yes, we want to tell our future with these stories, and we want to
tell it together.
And so the name "Cultural Collabs" .
So the idea really comes from the congenial pair, namely Jürgen
Dahlmanns from the company RugStar and our Anna Beselin , who is a
scientist and restorer with us.
We said, for example, we don't make it 1 to 1, but we mirror it .
So that communicates with each other.
That is already one thing.
Then the Dahlmanns brought these colors back in from these
color gradients, which are fire-related.
And I actually think the greatest idea is that he buttoned this
rudimentary new creation on silk, on white silk.
And at the same time, he then shifted the height of the threads, the pile again, so
that a three-dimensionality comes into it again, which makes the whole thing even more
lively. That's actually the great thing about it: that the new object
also has something to say.
Really another new work of art, which communicates with the old work of art.
The idea is that when we are closed and so it's not
visible, that we achieve a visibility, by having a
visibility in the virtual space, practically like a
puzzle like that, what you distribute into the world
and that comes back again.
So we distribute that into 100 objects.
The pieces are secured on site, the edges are secured.
We get a button on the back from DHL with a QR code
and go on the road.
And the first ones we give to people who have an online community themselves,
who help us create a reach.
So that everybody can take a piece and say that's mine and I'll add my story to
it and then it goes from there.
They then have the task of passing on this object, this one piece.
So all 100 pieces are sent out into the world one by one.
We're really glad we're doing this with DHL, because they're the pros, they can track
everywhere, where are the pieces?
So you can follow what the next ones are doing and then it comes together after
three and a half years.
And we have a new artwork of patchwork with hundreds of stories.
And of course the stories will be shared, hopefully with a lot of momentum so it's fun
to peek in.