Ambivalence of Warm Places

“Ode to Garden Carpet”

Baffeled by monoty and mocked by phantoms delirious, Beset by stalking Death in guises manfold;
The dreaded junns, the beasts ferocious,
The flaming heat and the exploding storms,

From all this peril here at last set free In the garden all find security.

[Poem by unknown Sufi poet, 15th century]

Join us on  for the inauguration of the project (…) Behind Togetherness, which will start with Ambivalence of Warm Places, workshops run by Mateusz Kula.  During the workshops we shall treat carpets as a physical construction material and as an architecture model, which will allow us to analyse (in theory and in practice) the paradoxical figures of friendship, community, sharing, commune, closing, solitude, isolation, hermitage etc.

More on Ambivalence of Warm Places:

The motif of an enclosed garden (Lat. hortus conclusus) seems to be the first laboratory for the investigation of the relation between multiplicity and singularity, as well as the first moment of separation of the order of nature from the order of culture. Garden–carpet is the oldest representation of this motif. In its symbolic dimension, very much like a prism, hortus conclusus brings together issues related to the individual and the community. The figure of an enclosed garden – represented by the carpet – encapsulates the aesthetic ambivalence of confinement and isolation, which constitute the prehistory of bourgeois culture (“my home is my castle”), and refer to this culture’s limited spaces, such as “zoo” or “nature reserve”. The enclosed garden – defined as the first wall, the first border or boundary between the man and wild nature – is a foundation gesture that creates human’s second nature, opening up contemplation of the human position in the world. The enclosed garden is more than a space that separates humans from their surroundings (wild nature); it also allows for its perception and contemplation. It is a moment that initiates all architecture.

                To hear one’s own voice one must initiate a constant change of perspective: from the detail (the particular/a part) to the panorama (multiplicity/entirety). In practice, it means working with forms of solitude and community, whose basis is found in the dialectical tension between being-as-individual and being-as-multitude.

All these problems will work as starting points and premises for workshops on the architecture of carpets–gardens.