7 6 #2 Tales of Symbologies: Gardening Visual Literacies by Hussein Shikha & Sadrie Alves The Carpet and the Garden are the departing points to look into how we have become alienated from craft and nature, as well as from intricate visual languages. A Carpet is a multi-layered entity with many dimensions and functionalities, both tangible and intangible, both material and symbolic. It can ground us and allure us to daydream. It is an entity that is capable of both carrying stories and gathering people. Borrowing Foucault’s idea of a heterotopia, which can describe the Persian carpet as a plan-like representation of a Persian garden. The Persian garden may well be the origin of the formal garden, its composition reflecting a poethical interpretation of life, and therefore, our connection to nature and other beings. During this week we will look into the ancient crafts and symbols of tapestries, woodblocks and their historical relation to the depiction of the natural world. How can we learn to read gardens and the life forms present in them again? Which plants are native or invasive, and who decides that? Revisiting the garden means exposing its underlying paradigms of urban/nature as well as the relationship between plants and modernity/coloniality. We regard the carpet as an autonomous intersection between art, craft and design while examining the forms of engagement and connection she instigates. Together, we will create a tapestry design with the use of woodblock-printing to generate a subjective map recording our reading of the plants in our surroundings. Students of various disciplines can engage in this workshop with their respective knowledges. We look closely into the metaphor of the carpet as a garden and its relations to the broader socioeconomic context. The bibliography and references are interdisciplinary and we encourage critical thinking and cross pollination with angles that challenge, inform and complement each other. The main concern of this workshop is to cultivate literacies by looking into different ways of seeing through theory and practice.
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