Unravelling the power of Southern Iraqi carpets
Published in Ponton magazine, Z33, Hasselt
A Carpet is a multilayered entity with many dimensions and functionalities, both tangible and intangible, both material and symbolic. It can ground us, alluring us to daydream. It is an entity that is capable of both carrying stories and gathering people.
Carpets can bear witness to very significant moments in history: cultural and artistic developments, the rise and fall of civilisations, and the subsequent emerging and merging of cultures in a non-linear way. They record vegetation, and other lives that may or may not exist anymore while bearing and witnessing histories that almost always take place underneath eurocentric discourses.
My childhood home was filled with them; they were placed on the ground, used as table decoration but they were also hung on the walls of our house to preserve warmth in the winter. One that has been embedded in my memory is an Iraqi carpet with purple and blue hues which was in my room. This particular carpet never left my memory. During my MA in graphic design I had the opportunity to finally dig deeper into the meaning this carpet might have embodied. Surfing the net and browsing the libraries in my reach, it struck me that there is little to no information to be found.
My academic training in design and art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp imposed north-western design hegemony, which values a so-called “universal design” that discredits many material and visual cultures. At a certain point in my education, this started to clash with my intersectional experience as an Arab who grew up with different [aesthetic] values and ways of viewing the world.
In finding ways to approach this Western canon I saw potentiality in the carpet. In places outside the West, the carpet is more than a delineation of space or simply a decoration – its functions are also holistic and spiritual, as with the prayer rug. It’s a space where you are in communication with the divine. During my displacement and immigration process, carpets were present in every place I had taken refuge in. From relatives' homes in Iraq to rented apartments in Syria to my home in Belgium. Carpets took on a new meaning for when I became diasporic. They became a spatialised representation of my Arab identity because stepping on them every day kept reminding me of my heritage. It created a sense of association to another place.
I was confused by how the carpet was discredited by the Western (graphic) design education that I received, because to me it ticks all the boxes for it to be a perfect example to understand / look anew at design / research what design is or can be. Why was the carpet distasteful and disregarded by this (graphic) design history? I was curious as to why this prejudice existed and I approached it by unfolding the subject during my MA research that specifically focused on southern Iraqi carpets. My questions followed along the lines of “When does crafts meet design?” and “How do we tackle the deconstruction of our biases on certain fields outside the purview of the design aesthetic?”
Design is a profession that is increasingly hard to define. What does and doesn’t fall under it according to dominant canons is something that has affected me both directly and indirectly since my studies in academia. Growing up in Iraq, certain forms such as ornamentations of Islamic iconographies are present everywhere. The same flower pattern would be found in ancient Iraqi monuments but also on tapestries. In the Arab-Muslim world, there is a unity that is reflected in diversity and everyday existence. It is a coherent world where both past and present exist parallel with each other, everything is reflected in everything. This phenomenon reflects philosophies of Islamic art. I have inherited these values and they are embedded in me and the way I view the world.
The graphic design I was taught in the West was limiting to me and I didn't feel comfortable with it. The discipline is about communicating about the world and what’s happening in it. But I was taught to communicate about this in a certain way (only). A gut feeling was telling me the way I'm being taught is not how I want to view the world or communicate about it. “Less is more” didn’t feel more to me. “Ornamentation being a crime” didn’t seem very criminal to me. “Form follows function”, except when the function is holistic, seems like a wasted opportunity to me. Beauty being not “reason enough” seemed like a wasted potential to me.
Finding Resonance in the Absent
I found resonance in my motherland’s material culture and Islamic art which both hold aspects of the Geometrical and the Arabesque. The former is a style of ornamentation based on constructing straight lines which reflects the Muslim fascination with mathematics. The intricacy of these geometric shapes, which are constructed of squares, rectangles, triangles, hexagons and octagons, expresses the unlimited creativity of keeping balance, symmetry and order in all these designs. The latter, Arabesque, is a stylistic art based on symmetry, repetitiveness and momentum which gives the viewer a unique sense of open-ended motion which continues beyond the shackles of the finite natural limits to tie the viewer close to infinity. This is one of Arabesque's complex and intricate freedoms. All of the interlacing lines, rosettes, vines and intertwining curves are indications of growth, motion and progress. The fluidity of these designs reflect the unity of creation as well as the unity of God.
All hold holistic values, acknowledge divine beauty, and its “more is more”-ness speaks to me. It both comforts me and fills me with pleasure and gives me a sense of belonging.
Studying in the West, it was apparent to me that those values and visual forms have been unacknowledged and devalued in the field of (graphic) design. To give an example, in my case, the feedback I received from my MA teachers regarding my project about carpets was often poor in addressing the artistic and conceptual value of carpets. The comments more often than not reduced the carpet's inherent relevance to comments on colours, stylisation of motifs and decoration from a Eurocentric viewpoint, leaving out other dimensions of the carpet that address the individuality and artistic reality that it embodies.
Creating an Absent Locality
Iraq has a deep and long history of many rich material and visual cultures. However, the practice of carpets has almost no record whatsoever. Quickly I came to realise the colonial, patriarchal, and dictatorial history of Iraq which led many cultural practices to fizzle out. Southern Iraqi carpet making was even more marginalised as southern Iraq used to be a place of refuge for those who opposed Saddam Hussein’s regime. Saddam took action by building multiple dams in the 1990s to drain the rivers that flowed through these regions. The drainage to this day has been an ecological disaster and it affects not only Iraq but the entire planet as it caused the demise of an ecosystem. Several endemic species of mammals, birds and fish have become extinct or are seriously threatened. In 2016 this region became a UNESCO world heritage site.
These calamities that befell southern Iraq caused people to abandon their crafts, art and cultural heritage, prioritising other things in order to survive. From the multiple foreign invasions to the drainage of the marshes, weavers were displaced and forced to leave their traditional way of living. On top of that, in 2019 the UN Environment Programme noted that “climate change in Iraq is expected to reduce annual rainfall, which will lead to a surge in dust storms, a reduction in agricultural productivity and increased water scarcity”. All of this of course leads to the interruption of most development associated with southern Iraqi weaving.
This sense of urgency and absence was multiplied when trying to look for books about these carpets with my mother in Baghdad. While looking through the books and asking around in Mutanabbi Street (a street on the banks of the River Tigris where dozens of booksellers have shops, a symbol of the city’s shifting fortunes), we encountered questions like: “Are you sure the people in southern Iraq weaved carpets?” and remarks like: “I am sure you are mistaken, they don't have carpet making practice.”
You see this erasure has been going on for such a long time that even the people in Iraq are slowly forgetting all these traditional practices.
Still we persisted, until we found one small book that had four pages of information on the carpets.
Craft and Landscape
Southern Iraqi carpets are made by the Marsh Arabs. The carpets they weave are unique and different from any other textile tradition in the Middle East. Flowers, animals, human figures, symbols and geometric motifs are embroidered with wool yarn on a hand-knotted stitching ground. The geographic setting of these carpets is very important: the Mesopotamian marshes of Iraq which lay between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which is also where the ancient Sumerians built some of the earliest known cities. It is said that the Gardens of Eden were sited here more than 5,000 years ago. These carpets are believed to be bearers of stories, myths, symbols and patterns that originate from the ancient Sumerian culture. This ancient culture also saw great value in woven textiles, as the act of weaving in Sumerian mythology is represented by Goddess Uttu who is known as the weaver goddess. Uttu in Sumerian means ‘the woven’ and she was illustrated as a spider in a web. She is the daughter of Nanna, god of the moon, and Ninhursag, the mother of the plains. Uttu taught women how to weave, which stopped humans from walking around naked and freezing to death.
The visual languages of Southern Iraqi crafts practice are embodied by the different ways the Marsh Arab understood working with the environment around them, expressing their own realities through the making of the carpet. Weaving carpets is one of the ancient handicrafts present in different regions of the world. In Rassam Arabzadeh’s words, carpets are “woven from the warps of emotion and the wefts of reflection”. In many cultures, carpets are not only everyday objects, they are capable of reporting about both the human being who is using them and the human being that wove them. Doing this collectively as well creates and sustains community. The carpet functions as a signifier of familiarity and togetherness, a gathering point with the possibility to find a home, and share knowledge, experience, and personal stories. It’s intergenerational. Mothers sit together with their children and share the way that they interact with the threads and reimagine the nature around them. Past, present and future are interwoven. It’s conceptual by default.
One aspect present in carpets is the practice of reflecting on one’s own locality. Weavers engage with their surroundings in dialogues of interpretation and creation. Living in harmony with nature, the carpet becomes a visual subjective map. In places outside the West, the carpet is more than a material space or simply a decoration. Its complexities, arabesques and abstraction trigger imagination.
We could say that Southern Iraqi carpets are a representation of the same rivers that have flown through the Mesopotamian marshes. The water stream is represented in the carpet's rich texture, and the torrent flow is represented in its complex and rich patterns. Symbols that interpret the fish, water buffalo and reeds that surround those rivers are present in the eternity of the carpet.
I understand my position as someone who’s part of this modern (Western) world and I assume my role in negotiating and going against dominant exclusive canons. As an Arab living in the West, I want to foreground forms of visual cultures that I and others can identify with and which are still underrepresented or absent in the field of design and art.
I am inspired by Jama'et Baghdad lil Fen al-Hadith, an Iraqi group of artists and designers who sought inspiration in Iraqi art and design history, which they gave a contemporary update, based on the art philosophy of 'استلهام التراث,' which means “to seek inspiration and motivation in tradition”. Their work is closely linked to Iraqi independence and was considered a form of resistance as they integrated ancient Babylonian iconography (a visual language indigenous to Iraq), to tell the political reality at a time when Western influence was very prominent (Latin script amongst others).
Following the steps of Jama'et Baghdad lil Fen al-Hadith core principles I want to ask: Can centring traditions and philosophies associated with carpets, serve as a way to generate new ways of design and art-making? Can these strategies make it possible to ‘de-modernise’ my design and art practice? Taking into consideration the craft’s exoticised and marginalised state in the West, how can this epistemology be contextualised?
Not only do I attempt to create this absent locality but I assume my role in preserving an Iraqi visual language present in the practice of carpet weaving. This is a practice that has been undermined by many factors: industrialisation, colonialism and Iraq’s past and present tragedies. These carpets carry a rich collective history and can offer a tool that is at once capable of de-modernisation and generating more inclusive narratives.
I start with collecting tools that can help me create this missing locality. These tools help me visualise and formulate a personal graphic/visual opinion that can encapsulate the values mentioned above, ultimately creating a sense of belonging that me and others can relate to.
First Tool: “Multi-centred” perspective
It is interesting to make note of the perspective the carpet weaver makes use of to visualise a locality. The visual representation of everything is depicted from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Everything is represented equally in a harmonious whole, there is no hierarchy and no simulation of depth. The weaver understands the carpet as a space that is not facing the self, but the space in which the self is situated. Not a space “in front of” but one that “surrounds”, not observation but participation.
According to Bjornar Olsan, humanity has exaggerated the centrality of its position in history and our ecosystem. Simulation of depth was developed in 1415 in Italy and subsequently people started to visualise themselves as centres, something that was only unique to divine entities at the time. It also meant that humans started to think of themselves as “more important than”. As R. Latif & G. Haider point out:
This [linear] perspective rendering is very similar to the later use of the camera. The spatial organisation and unfolding of space in the Renaissance is rational and straight forward. The understanding of this space can only have one interpretation. The space in Islamic art and architecture is more complex and is also geometrically constructed but is very different from the geometric one point perspective constructions of the Renaissance. Ibn Al-Haytham, an Iraqi scholar, is known to have researched and correctly concluded from scientific proof the functioning of the human eye. He is also credited to having invented the camera obscura. This shows that the Muslim scholars and artists were well aware of how a realistic image could be produced. Islamic architecture is geometrically constructed but is not meant to be viewed from one particular point. It unfolds like the narrative space of a miniature painting with different parts playing different roles in the bigger architectural composition. The spaces have different spatial qualities like the simultaneous events within the miniature painting, one space has to be experienced after the other in real time and space to understand the spatial narrative of the architecture.
All things considered, a multi-centred perspective is one way of visualising the world and many relate to it, myself included. It took me a while to adjust and learn “linear perspective”. Assuming everyone can read linear perspectives is wrong, if not harmful, to those who do not have that visual literacy. Children in their early ages instinctively draw pictures from a “multi-centrred” perspective which differentiates between the relative positions and arrangement of (pictorial) space. It’s a “diffused composition” as multiple centres are given attention based on the accurate visual perception of space. This approach is not only unique to children's drawings or carpets but it is also present in many cultures outside the West, for example Persian manuscripts, Japanese paintings, Chinese paintings and ancient Sumerian stone carvings.
We can thus note that linear perspective is a cultural skill that is taught and it should not be categorised as ‘universal’.
We can also take note that in the digital/virtual world that's using axonometric imagery as opposed to optical realism, axonometric is 'scrollable' because it has no vanishing point. This is essential to understand when we later go into the video game medium I am currently exploring.
Second Tool: Collecting symbols
One aspect present in Iraqi carpet making is the practice of reflecting on one’s own locality. Weavers engage with their surroundings in dialogues of interpretation and creation.
For the indigenous people of southern Iraq, their ways of living are close to the cycles of the earth. They sustain themselves by harvesting reeds, growing rice and fishing. They also keep small herds of water buffalo, which they use for milk. Because the area has a large quantity of wild wheat, Tannour Bread or simply khubz is present in every household. The bread is cooked over a fire on round clay platters and is mentioned as early as in the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh. The dough is put flat sideways into the clay oven and I still remember how my grandma and a few of my aunts would make this, my mother was too scared of the fire.
In one of the few images of southern Iraqi carpets I found on the internet, there is a scan of a detail of a combination of different symbols which I speculate is a representation of the Khubz baking practice. It is safe to say that the carpet becomes a visual subjective map and therefore represents the entirety of an ecosystem that can exist within a weaver's proximity. Borrowing Foucault's idea of a heterotopia, which can describe the Persian carpet as a plan-like representation of a Persian garden. Its motifs of the frame, the central medallion and the grid represent various architectural elements found in Persian gardens, such as the surrounding wall, the central fountain, the kiosk, and the doorways to the garden.
Third Tool: Translation to pixel
Fragments between the rivers
During my residency in Het Bos, I was researching the relationship between carpets and the region where they were made and I couldn’t help but notice how central water and the rivers –Tigris and Euphrates – were in daily life. Together with reminiscences of old Sumerian symbols and drawings, tapestry-makers often weave depictions of everyday life in their work. I was inspired by this and instantly tried to do the same with my own take on the old art form. I decided to work with fragments from video footage my family had sent me of the marshlands and its surrounding regions. As someone in the diaspora, my distant memories of spending time close to these rivers kept on haunting me. Feeling this strong sense of nostalgia for my motherland, I wanted to explore the intricate relationship between rivers and these textiles. Remembering the nourishment the rivers brought upon these lands, the ways they sustained hearts and inspired souls to live, care and create.
On the technical and aesthetic capacities of this work, pixelation becomes a thread or a connection between technologies of carpet making and the development of digital computing. With this work I hoped to oppose arguments which relegate carpet making to an older temporal order, one incapable of connecting to modern technologies. Contrary to conventional ways of seeing digital technologies, there are real and vital connections – structural, aesthetic, even spiritual connections – between older ways of weaving reality and newer ways. In the context of my diaspora, pixelation functions as a medium through which a fractured reality is articulated—one that can only be fully comprehended through its very fracturedness. Its pixelated digital form allows it to cross borders and reach those outside the West.
As Hito Steyerl puts it:
Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread. Poor[pixelated] images are poor[pixelated] because they are heavily compressed and travel quickly. They lose matter and gain speed.
I came to realise that after my immigration to the West, I have entered a third space, an in-between, this diasporic experience changes a person indefinitely. One cannot just go back, you have to find a detour to go back. In discovering the power of the pixelated image, its ease and speed of travel, I saw a way back, and I started to look into the phenomenon I want to call the “digital carpet” and looking for ways to “broadcast” this carpet. I was really fascinated by this new found link between computing and weaving and I was curious to see what it meant for the southern Iraqi carpet to exist within this different temporality. My next phase was to further broaden my understanding of the southern Iraqi carpet, unravelling their lost knowledge and more of their many meanings.
Fourth Tool: Digitisation
My motivation and interest in using pixelation stems from my childhood, which took place in somewhat difficult circumstances. It was difficult to go outside as children. Therefore, our parents provided us with video game consoles, although they were expensive, my parents still saw merit in having them and keeping us well entertained inside, allowing us to lose ourselves into those digital realms which were full of colours and pixels. At the same time, I was surrounded by carpets with Islamic iconography and plant motifs. Those two worlds mixed in my child's mind – I saw pixels in the carpets and vice versa. When looking at carpets with great concentration for a long time, you get a very dreamy effect and the visuals on the carpet start to move around a bit. I made up narratives in the fabrics and they started to become fantasy lands. That is how the textile came to life in my mind.
To my surprise the link between these two technologies was far deeper than my child mind had anticipated; as Teshome H. Gabriel and Fabian Wagnuster put it:
In fact, despite the newness often attributed to computer technology, much of its vocabulary, as well as that of the internet, draws on relational concepts borrowed from back-strap weaving. Terms such as texture, pattern, layering, links, nodes, sampling, net, network, web, web weaver, and threads belong to a lexicon employed in both weaving and computing. On a structural level, they both rely on the use of crossing, interweaving lines. Aesthetically and conceptually, too, there are similar cross-thread mechanisms at work. The origins of the computer have in fact always been connected to weaving: the first machines were merely extensions of looms, and computers the extensions of mechanised looms.
Western computer ideology, even as it uses the terms and concepts of weaving, does not acknowledge its own historical connection to the technological strategies of weaving in the Third World [sic]; nor does it try to incorporate its communal aspects. Indeed, despite computer ideology's emphasis on globalisation, its attention to past traditions, community, and the environment is markedly absent. On the contrary, technology has emphasised a dis-connection from the past, the separation of individuals, and a turning away from the natural world. Thus, whereas the Third World [sic] is represented as having a more ecological, more connected, (dare we say) more spiritual view of others and the world, computer technology tends to think of tradition in merely instrumental terms, something to help it designate tools, objects, and users – all of which are ultimately and tacitly reincorporated in to a Western perspective.
It’s important to highlight that in most texts the only time the history of carpets and computers intersect is when they speak about the jacquard loom, thus staying with the “great men” of the industrial revolution, which really just erases all the work and production of knowledge that female weavers have contributed for years prior. (Minoo Moalem, The Persian Carpet, 2018)
Fifth Tool: Animation
As Bahia Shehab puts it:
Even in supposedly ‘static’ artworks, the patterning – arabesques, swirls, geometric compositions – have movement. The minute I looked at this fishbowl I saw it move – layers of patterns in motion, patterns of unity, linked to the continuity of the universe.
This fascination with these “moving” arabesques present in Islamic iconography is not only something I experience but others too, which made me reflect and pose the question of whether a carpet can be translated into an animation. This question informed my artistic exploration of the “digital carpet”.
Using examples of “rhythmic repetition and symmetry” underlying Islamic art, I explore ways in which the symbols I found can be employed dynamically. We can understand an animation as a series of still images that are shown in rapid succession to create the illusion of motion. First motion is a transitional movement of two symbols extending inwards from the outside collapsing into each other creating a hybrid symbol in one axis which converges endlessly. Second motion is a transitional movement of Quadrilateral symmetry extending inwards from the four corners and collapsing into each other creating a hybrid symbol in four axes, eight times which converges endlessly.
These animations were meant to represent patterns present in carpets, as Bahia Shehab mentions the staticity of patterning having motion, animation multiplies this notion.
We can understand symmetry as a series of ways in which a single motif can be repeated an exact number of times. In the first example you see the mirroring of the symbol once. In the second example you see it happening twice. It is interspersed over the large section of the composition. Also understanding some of the geometrically arranged patterns, the symbol becomes a dynamic frame.
Sixth Tool: Video game
Growing up in Iraq playing video games, I was mainly drawn to video games developed in the East. I was not yet conscious of the differences between eastern and Western developers. Perhaps it was Spacetoon TV’s influence - a pan–Arab free–to–air television channel which aired many Arabic dubbed eastern made animations - or maybe it was the games box art that sometimes had beautiful ornamentations, symbolism and a very rich visual language.
I enjoyed playing games like Legend of Mana, Saga Frontiers 2, Breath of Fire IV, Dragon Quest and many others. These games to me had an indescribable magical charm that I did not understand. I have always appreciated the way those worlds were built and presented, and I'm only now starting to understand why.
This genre of video games is called Eastern-RPG(role-playing games). Eastern-RPGs are typically made by Japanese developers but not exclusively. They are immensely story-driven as there is less focus on gameplay and more on the unravelling of events which lead the story.
Specifically the games I played all had a top-down perspective, and a non-linear or deep-linear open world gameplay, allowing the entire game world to be explored in an open-ended manner. Dragon quest’s franchise is an early example of non-linear open world gameplay. This top-down non-linear open world approach is something we can compare to the Multi-centered perspective present in carpets. Similar to the carpet, this sub-genre of games saw no imitation of depth; everything in this virtual world is portrayed equally in a beautiful totality. These types of games see the environment as one wherein the player is located; this is called “Third-person point of view”. Rather than one wherein the player is facing the environment; this is called “First-person point of view”, which limits contextual information on the surroundings. Games that use a Third person point of view become spaces that surround as opposed to one that is in front of the player. It provides a sense of physical presence in its virtual environment through a visual embodiment (controlled character). The embodied representation of these elements helps the players to contextualise aspects inside the game's virtual environment, giving the player a richer perception of the world. In a similar way, video games also function as heterotopias. Similar to carpets, video games essentially create an entirely new universe inside the purview of the two-dimensional flat surface.
It is also interesting to note that Eastern-RPG genre heavily relies on mythological stories, whether it’s a loose source of inspiration for character design, game mechanics, worldbuilding or storyline.
Video games are possibly a contemporary iteration of carpets. They are inherently linked and as explained earlier, both share analogous technologies; weaving and computing. Therefore some games share a distinct aesthetic similarity to the carpet as both rely on a grid/pixel system.
Just like with any digital media, video games have the potential to transgress borders and travel beyond rules and regulations. Certain game consoles didn’t make their way to Iraq until much later. When they did, for example, the Playstation 1’s were bootlegged systems which made it possible for anyone with access to the internet to download any game and burn it on CD’s. Markets in Bab Al Sharqi in the 2000’s flourished with self burned CD’s and it was up to the seller to choose which game they wanted to distribute. There was one seller I always begged my Dad to take me to, because he would sell those niche Japanese anime-esque video games, which were derived from the Eastern games earlier mentioned. Vendors rarely dared to stock those niche games because they were not as popular as products similar to FIFA and Tekken.
Since the 2000’s, the video game medium has further developed along with advanced technologies. With open source game engines like Unity and Godot, the possibility of self-publishing changed the whole industry. This and the multiplication of distribution and platforms (this being smartphones, PC’s, Mac os, and Linux) has opened up new ways to approach video games.
The video game as a potential tool to share knowledge
Taking my diasporic experience in consideration, I arrived at the video game medium aware of its potential to transgress borders and velocity of travelling speed. It can also function as a very powerful archival, storytelling and educational tool.
I decided to venture into the self-publishing world to develop a video game interlaced with the Iraqi carpet. Each element present in the game is an animated translation derived from the carpet, from the characters you interact with to the environment presented. For example, the avatar you control is an element I found in a carpet that resembles that of a dancing figure. In translating it into an animation and having it function in the video game, I had to imagine the way this dancing figure would walk, sideways and up and down. What would this character’s back look like? How would its hands and legs move around? How fast would it move? These are questions I take into account when animating the avatar’s idle and walk animation and coding the way it would interact with this digital carpet that is the game level.
The storytelling is in its development phase as I write this. During my artist residency at Morpho Antwerp I am studying the complex histories and folklore that surrounds these carpets.
I believe that storytelling in video games is an aspect that allows for a nuanced understanding of the intricacy present in southern Iraqi carpets. It is capable of conveying visual, oral, symbolic and textual information which can be appealing to young and mature audiences.
The integration of storytelling makes it possible to introduce a glossary of symbols, inviting the player to engage with the stories that each symbol from a carpet bears. At the same time, it roots those stories in their specific histories, allowing them to have new meanings today, therefore, creating and giving them a new temporality.
Published in Ponton magazine, Z33, Hasselt
A Carpet is a multilayered entity with many dimensions and functionalities, both tangible and intangible, both material and symbolic. It can ground us, alluring us to daydream. It is an entity that is capable of both carrying stories and gathering people.
Carpets can bear witness to very significant moments in history: cultural and artistic developments, the rise and fall of civilisations, and the subsequent emerging and merging of cultures in a non-linear way. They record vegetation, and other lives that may or may not exist anymore while bearing and witnessing histories that almost always take place underneath eurocentric discourses.
My childhood home was filled with them; they were placed on the ground, used as table decoration but they were also hung on the walls of our house to preserve warmth in the winter. One that has been embedded in my memory is an Iraqi carpet with purple and blue hues which was in my room. This particular carpet never left my memory. During my MA in graphic design I had the opportunity to finally dig deeper into the meaning this carpet might have embodied. Surfing the net and browsing the libraries in my reach, it struck me that there is little to no information to be found.
My academic training in design and art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp imposed north-western design hegemony, which values a so-called “universal design” that discredits many material and visual cultures. At a certain point in my education, this started to clash with my intersectional experience as an Arab who grew up with different [aesthetic] values and ways of viewing the world.
In finding ways to approach this Western canon I saw potentiality in the carpet. In places outside the West, the carpet is more than a delineation of space or simply a decoration – its functions are also holistic and spiritual, as with the prayer rug. It’s a space where you are in communication with the divine. During my displacement and immigration process, carpets were present in every place I had taken refuge in. From relatives' homes in Iraq to rented apartments in Syria to my home in Belgium. Carpets took on a new meaning for when I became diasporic. They became a spatialised representation of my Arab identity because stepping on them every day kept reminding me of my heritage. It created a sense of association to another place.
I was confused by how the carpet was discredited by the Western (graphic) design education that I received, because to me it ticks all the boxes for it to be a perfect example to understand / look anew at design / research what design is or can be. Why was the carpet distasteful and disregarded by this (graphic) design history? I was curious as to why this prejudice existed and I approached it by unfolding the subject during my MA research that specifically focused on southern Iraqi carpets. My questions followed along the lines of “When does crafts meet design?” and “How do we tackle the deconstruction of our biases on certain fields outside the purview of the design aesthetic?”
Design is a profession that is increasingly hard to define. What does and doesn’t fall under it according to dominant canons is something that has affected me both directly and indirectly since my studies in academia. Growing up in Iraq, certain forms such as ornamentations of Islamic iconographies are present everywhere. The same flower pattern would be found in ancient Iraqi monuments but also on tapestries. In the Arab-Muslim world, there is a unity that is reflected in diversity and everyday existence. It is a coherent world where both past and present exist parallel with each other, everything is reflected in everything. This phenomenon reflects philosophies of Islamic art. I have inherited these values and they are embedded in me and the way I view the world.
The graphic design I was taught in the West was limiting to me and I didn't feel comfortable with it. The discipline is about communicating about the world and what’s happening in it. But I was taught to communicate about this in a certain way (only). A gut feeling was telling me the way I'm being taught is not how I want to view the world or communicate about it. “Less is more” didn’t feel more to me. “Ornamentation being a crime” didn’t seem very criminal to me. “Form follows function”, except when the function is holistic, seems like a wasted opportunity to me. Beauty being not “reason enough” seemed like a wasted potential to me.
Finding Resonance in the Absent
I found resonance in my motherland’s material culture and Islamic art which both hold aspects of the Geometrical and the Arabesque. The former is a style of ornamentation based on constructing straight lines which reflects the Muslim fascination with mathematics. The intricacy of these geometric shapes, which are constructed of squares, rectangles, triangles, hexagons and octagons, expresses the unlimited creativity of keeping balance, symmetry and order in all these designs. The latter, Arabesque, is a stylistic art based on symmetry, repetitiveness and momentum which gives the viewer a unique sense of open-ended motion which continues beyond the shackles of the finite natural limits to tie the viewer close to infinity. This is one of Arabesque's complex and intricate freedoms. All of the interlacing lines, rosettes, vines and intertwining curves are indications of growth, motion and progress. The fluidity of these designs reflect the unity of creation as well as the unity of God.
All hold holistic values, acknowledge divine beauty, and its “more is more”-ness speaks to me. It both comforts me and fills me with pleasure and gives me a sense of belonging.
Studying in the West, it was apparent to me that those values and visual forms have been unacknowledged and devalued in the field of (graphic) design. To give an example, in my case, the feedback I received from my MA teachers regarding my project about carpets was often poor in addressing the artistic and conceptual value of carpets. The comments more often than not reduced the carpet's inherent relevance to comments on colours, stylisation of motifs and decoration from a Eurocentric viewpoint, leaving out other dimensions of the carpet that address the individuality and artistic reality that it embodies.
Creating an Absent Locality
Iraq has a deep and long history of many rich material and visual cultures. However, the practice of carpets has almost no record whatsoever. Quickly I came to realise the colonial, patriarchal, and dictatorial history of Iraq which led many cultural practices to fizzle out. Southern Iraqi carpet making was even more marginalised as southern Iraq used to be a place of refuge for those who opposed Saddam Hussein’s regime. Saddam took action by building multiple dams in the 1990s to drain the rivers that flowed through these regions. The drainage to this day has been an ecological disaster and it affects not only Iraq but the entire planet as it caused the demise of an ecosystem. Several endemic species of mammals, birds and fish have become extinct or are seriously threatened. In 2016 this region became a UNESCO world heritage site.
These calamities that befell southern Iraq caused people to abandon their crafts, art and cultural heritage, prioritising other things in order to survive. From the multiple foreign invasions to the drainage of the marshes, weavers were displaced and forced to leave their traditional way of living. On top of that, in 2019 the UN Environment Programme noted that “climate change in Iraq is expected to reduce annual rainfall, which will lead to a surge in dust storms, a reduction in agricultural productivity and increased water scarcity”. All of this of course leads to the interruption of most development associated with southern Iraqi weaving.
This sense of urgency and absence was multiplied when trying to look for books about these carpets with my mother in Baghdad. While looking through the books and asking around in Mutanabbi Street (a street on the banks of the River Tigris where dozens of booksellers have shops, a symbol of the city’s shifting fortunes), we encountered questions like: “Are you sure the people in southern Iraq weaved carpets?” and remarks like: “I am sure you are mistaken, they don't have carpet making practice.”
You see this erasure has been going on for such a long time that even the people in Iraq are slowly forgetting all these traditional practices.
Still we persisted, until we found one small book that had four pages of information on the carpets.
Craft and Landscape
Southern Iraqi carpets are made by the Marsh Arabs. The carpets they weave are unique and different from any other textile tradition in the Middle East. Flowers, animals, human figures, symbols and geometric motifs are embroidered with wool yarn on a hand-knotted stitching ground. The geographic setting of these carpets is very important: the Mesopotamian marshes of Iraq which lay between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, which is also where the ancient Sumerians built some of the earliest known cities. It is said that the Gardens of Eden were sited here more than 5,000 years ago. These carpets are believed to be bearers of stories, myths, symbols and patterns that originate from the ancient Sumerian culture. This ancient culture also saw great value in woven textiles, as the act of weaving in Sumerian mythology is represented by Goddess Uttu who is known as the weaver goddess. Uttu in Sumerian means ‘the woven’ and she was illustrated as a spider in a web. She is the daughter of Nanna, god of the moon, and Ninhursag, the mother of the plains. Uttu taught women how to weave, which stopped humans from walking around naked and freezing to death.
The visual languages of Southern Iraqi crafts practice are embodied by the different ways the Marsh Arab understood working with the environment around them, expressing their own realities through the making of the carpet. Weaving carpets is one of the ancient handicrafts present in different regions of the world. In Rassam Arabzadeh’s words, carpets are “woven from the warps of emotion and the wefts of reflection”. In many cultures, carpets are not only everyday objects, they are capable of reporting about both the human being who is using them and the human being that wove them. Doing this collectively as well creates and sustains community. The carpet functions as a signifier of familiarity and togetherness, a gathering point with the possibility to find a home, and share knowledge, experience, and personal stories. It’s intergenerational. Mothers sit together with their children and share the way that they interact with the threads and reimagine the nature around them. Past, present and future are interwoven. It’s conceptual by default.
One aspect present in carpets is the practice of reflecting on one’s own locality. Weavers engage with their surroundings in dialogues of interpretation and creation. Living in harmony with nature, the carpet becomes a visual subjective map. In places outside the West, the carpet is more than a material space or simply a decoration. Its complexities, arabesques and abstraction trigger imagination.
We could say that Southern Iraqi carpets are a representation of the same rivers that have flown through the Mesopotamian marshes. The water stream is represented in the carpet's rich texture, and the torrent flow is represented in its complex and rich patterns. Symbols that interpret the fish, water buffalo and reeds that surround those rivers are present in the eternity of the carpet.
I understand my position as someone who’s part of this modern (Western) world and I assume my role in negotiating and going against dominant exclusive canons. As an Arab living in the West, I want to foreground forms of visual cultures that I and others can identify with and which are still underrepresented or absent in the field of design and art.
I am inspired by Jama'et Baghdad lil Fen al-Hadith, an Iraqi group of artists and designers who sought inspiration in Iraqi art and design history, which they gave a contemporary update, based on the art philosophy of 'استلهام التراث,' which means “to seek inspiration and motivation in tradition”. Their work is closely linked to Iraqi independence and was considered a form of resistance as they integrated ancient Babylonian iconography (a visual language indigenous to Iraq), to tell the political reality at a time when Western influence was very prominent (Latin script amongst others).
Following the steps of Jama'et Baghdad lil Fen al-Hadith core principles I want to ask: Can centring traditions and philosophies associated with carpets, serve as a way to generate new ways of design and art-making? Can these strategies make it possible to ‘de-modernise’ my design and art practice? Taking into consideration the craft’s exoticised and marginalised state in the West, how can this epistemology be contextualised?
Not only do I attempt to create this absent locality but I assume my role in preserving an Iraqi visual language present in the practice of carpet weaving. This is a practice that has been undermined by many factors: industrialisation, colonialism and Iraq’s past and present tragedies. These carpets carry a rich collective history and can offer a tool that is at once capable of de-modernisation and generating more inclusive narratives.
I start with collecting tools that can help me create this missing locality. These tools help me visualise and formulate a personal graphic/visual opinion that can encapsulate the values mentioned above, ultimately creating a sense of belonging that me and others can relate to.
First Tool: “Multi-centred” perspective
It is interesting to make note of the perspective the carpet weaver makes use of to visualise a locality. The visual representation of everything is depicted from multiple viewpoints simultaneously. Everything is represented equally in a harmonious whole, there is no hierarchy and no simulation of depth. The weaver understands the carpet as a space that is not facing the self, but the space in which the self is situated. Not a space “in front of” but one that “surrounds”, not observation but participation.
According to Bjornar Olsan, humanity has exaggerated the centrality of its position in history and our ecosystem. Simulation of depth was developed in 1415 in Italy and subsequently people started to visualise themselves as centres, something that was only unique to divine entities at the time. It also meant that humans started to think of themselves as “more important than”. As R. Latif & G. Haider point out:
This [linear] perspective rendering is very similar to the later use of the camera. The spatial organisation and unfolding of space in the Renaissance is rational and straight forward. The understanding of this space can only have one interpretation. The space in Islamic art and architecture is more complex and is also geometrically constructed but is very different from the geometric one point perspective constructions of the Renaissance. Ibn Al-Haytham, an Iraqi scholar, is known to have researched and correctly concluded from scientific proof the functioning of the human eye. He is also credited to having invented the camera obscura. This shows that the Muslim scholars and artists were well aware of how a realistic image could be produced. Islamic architecture is geometrically constructed but is not meant to be viewed from one particular point. It unfolds like the narrative space of a miniature painting with different parts playing different roles in the bigger architectural composition. The spaces have different spatial qualities like the simultaneous events within the miniature painting, one space has to be experienced after the other in real time and space to understand the spatial narrative of the architecture.
All things considered, a multi-centred perspective is one way of visualising the world and many relate to it, myself included. It took me a while to adjust and learn “linear perspective”. Assuming everyone can read linear perspectives is wrong, if not harmful, to those who do not have that visual literacy. Children in their early ages instinctively draw pictures from a “multi-centrred” perspective which differentiates between the relative positions and arrangement of (pictorial) space. It’s a “diffused composition” as multiple centres are given attention based on the accurate visual perception of space. This approach is not only unique to children's drawings or carpets but it is also present in many cultures outside the West, for example Persian manuscripts, Japanese paintings, Chinese paintings and ancient Sumerian stone carvings.
We can thus note that linear perspective is a cultural skill that is taught and it should not be categorised as ‘universal’.
We can also take note that in the digital/virtual world that's using axonometric imagery as opposed to optical realism, axonometric is 'scrollable' because it has no vanishing point. This is essential to understand when we later go into the video game medium I am currently exploring.
Second Tool: Collecting symbols
One aspect present in Iraqi carpet making is the practice of reflecting on one’s own locality. Weavers engage with their surroundings in dialogues of interpretation and creation.
For the indigenous people of southern Iraq, their ways of living are close to the cycles of the earth. They sustain themselves by harvesting reeds, growing rice and fishing. They also keep small herds of water buffalo, which they use for milk. Because the area has a large quantity of wild wheat, Tannour Bread or simply khubz is present in every household. The bread is cooked over a fire on round clay platters and is mentioned as early as in the Akkadian Epic of Gilgamesh. The dough is put flat sideways into the clay oven and I still remember how my grandma and a few of my aunts would make this, my mother was too scared of the fire.
In one of the few images of southern Iraqi carpets I found on the internet, there is a scan of a detail of a combination of different symbols which I speculate is a representation of the Khubz baking practice. It is safe to say that the carpet becomes a visual subjective map and therefore represents the entirety of an ecosystem that can exist within a weaver's proximity. Borrowing Foucault's idea of a heterotopia, which can describe the Persian carpet as a plan-like representation of a Persian garden. Its motifs of the frame, the central medallion and the grid represent various architectural elements found in Persian gardens, such as the surrounding wall, the central fountain, the kiosk, and the doorways to the garden.
Third Tool: Translation to pixel
Fragments between the rivers
During my residency in Het Bos, I was researching the relationship between carpets and the region where they were made and I couldn’t help but notice how central water and the rivers –Tigris and Euphrates – were in daily life. Together with reminiscences of old Sumerian symbols and drawings, tapestry-makers often weave depictions of everyday life in their work. I was inspired by this and instantly tried to do the same with my own take on the old art form. I decided to work with fragments from video footage my family had sent me of the marshlands and its surrounding regions. As someone in the diaspora, my distant memories of spending time close to these rivers kept on haunting me. Feeling this strong sense of nostalgia for my motherland, I wanted to explore the intricate relationship between rivers and these textiles. Remembering the nourishment the rivers brought upon these lands, the ways they sustained hearts and inspired souls to live, care and create.
On the technical and aesthetic capacities of this work, pixelation becomes a thread or a connection between technologies of carpet making and the development of digital computing. With this work I hoped to oppose arguments which relegate carpet making to an older temporal order, one incapable of connecting to modern technologies. Contrary to conventional ways of seeing digital technologies, there are real and vital connections – structural, aesthetic, even spiritual connections – between older ways of weaving reality and newer ways. In the context of my diaspora, pixelation functions as a medium through which a fractured reality is articulated—one that can only be fully comprehended through its very fracturedness. Its pixelated digital form allows it to cross borders and reach those outside the West.
As Hito Steyerl puts it:
Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread. Poor[pixelated] images are poor[pixelated] because they are heavily compressed and travel quickly. They lose matter and gain speed.
I came to realise that after my immigration to the West, I have entered a third space, an in-between, this diasporic experience changes a person indefinitely. One cannot just go back, you have to find a detour to go back. In discovering the power of the pixelated image, its ease and speed of travel, I saw a way back, and I started to look into the phenomenon I want to call the “digital carpet” and looking for ways to “broadcast” this carpet. I was really fascinated by this new found link between computing and weaving and I was curious to see what it meant for the southern Iraqi carpet to exist within this different temporality. My next phase was to further broaden my understanding of the southern Iraqi carpet, unravelling their lost knowledge and more of their many meanings.
Fourth Tool: Digitisation
My motivation and interest in using pixelation stems from my childhood, which took place in somewhat difficult circumstances. It was difficult to go outside as children. Therefore, our parents provided us with video game consoles, although they were expensive, my parents still saw merit in having them and keeping us well entertained inside, allowing us to lose ourselves into those digital realms which were full of colours and pixels. At the same time, I was surrounded by carpets with Islamic iconography and plant motifs. Those two worlds mixed in my child's mind – I saw pixels in the carpets and vice versa. When looking at carpets with great concentration for a long time, you get a very dreamy effect and the visuals on the carpet start to move around a bit. I made up narratives in the fabrics and they started to become fantasy lands. That is how the textile came to life in my mind.
To my surprise the link between these two technologies was far deeper than my child mind had anticipated; as Teshome H. Gabriel and Fabian Wagnuster put it:
In fact, despite the newness often attributed to computer technology, much of its vocabulary, as well as that of the internet, draws on relational concepts borrowed from back-strap weaving. Terms such as texture, pattern, layering, links, nodes, sampling, net, network, web, web weaver, and threads belong to a lexicon employed in both weaving and computing. On a structural level, they both rely on the use of crossing, interweaving lines. Aesthetically and conceptually, too, there are similar cross-thread mechanisms at work. The origins of the computer have in fact always been connected to weaving: the first machines were merely extensions of looms, and computers the extensions of mechanised looms.
Western computer ideology, even as it uses the terms and concepts of weaving, does not acknowledge its own historical connection to the technological strategies of weaving in the Third World [sic]; nor does it try to incorporate its communal aspects. Indeed, despite computer ideology's emphasis on globalisation, its attention to past traditions, community, and the environment is markedly absent. On the contrary, technology has emphasised a dis-connection from the past, the separation of individuals, and a turning away from the natural world. Thus, whereas the Third World [sic] is represented as having a more ecological, more connected, (dare we say) more spiritual view of others and the world, computer technology tends to think of tradition in merely instrumental terms, something to help it designate tools, objects, and users – all of which are ultimately and tacitly reincorporated in to a Western perspective.
It’s important to highlight that in most texts the only time the history of carpets and computers intersect is when they speak about the jacquard loom, thus staying with the “great men” of the industrial revolution, which really just erases all the work and production of knowledge that female weavers have contributed for years prior. (Minoo Moalem, The Persian Carpet, 2018)
Fifth Tool: Animation
As Bahia Shehab puts it:
Even in supposedly ‘static’ artworks, the patterning – arabesques, swirls, geometric compositions – have movement. The minute I looked at this fishbowl I saw it move – layers of patterns in motion, patterns of unity, linked to the continuity of the universe.
This fascination with these “moving” arabesques present in Islamic iconography is not only something I experience but others too, which made me reflect and pose the question of whether a carpet can be translated into an animation. This question informed my artistic exploration of the “digital carpet”.
Using examples of “rhythmic repetition and symmetry” underlying Islamic art, I explore ways in which the symbols I found can be employed dynamically. We can understand an animation as a series of still images that are shown in rapid succession to create the illusion of motion. First motion is a transitional movement of two symbols extending inwards from the outside collapsing into each other creating a hybrid symbol in one axis which converges endlessly. Second motion is a transitional movement of Quadrilateral symmetry extending inwards from the four corners and collapsing into each other creating a hybrid symbol in four axes, eight times which converges endlessly.
These animations were meant to represent patterns present in carpets, as Bahia Shehab mentions the staticity of patterning having motion, animation multiplies this notion.
We can understand symmetry as a series of ways in which a single motif can be repeated an exact number of times. In the first example you see the mirroring of the symbol once. In the second example you see it happening twice. It is interspersed over the large section of the composition. Also understanding some of the geometrically arranged patterns, the symbol becomes a dynamic frame.
Sixth Tool: Video game
Growing up in Iraq playing video games, I was mainly drawn to video games developed in the East. I was not yet conscious of the differences between eastern and Western developers. Perhaps it was Spacetoon TV’s influence - a pan–Arab free–to–air television channel which aired many Arabic dubbed eastern made animations - or maybe it was the games box art that sometimes had beautiful ornamentations, symbolism and a very rich visual language.
I enjoyed playing games like Legend of Mana, Saga Frontiers 2, Breath of Fire IV, Dragon Quest and many others. These games to me had an indescribable magical charm that I did not understand. I have always appreciated the way those worlds were built and presented, and I'm only now starting to understand why.
This genre of video games is called Eastern-RPG(role-playing games). Eastern-RPGs are typically made by Japanese developers but not exclusively. They are immensely story-driven as there is less focus on gameplay and more on the unravelling of events which lead the story.
Specifically the games I played all had a top-down perspective, and a non-linear or deep-linear open world gameplay, allowing the entire game world to be explored in an open-ended manner. Dragon quest’s franchise is an early example of non-linear open world gameplay. This top-down non-linear open world approach is something we can compare to the Multi-centered perspective present in carpets. Similar to the carpet, this sub-genre of games saw no imitation of depth; everything in this virtual world is portrayed equally in a beautiful totality. These types of games see the environment as one wherein the player is located; this is called “Third-person point of view”. Rather than one wherein the player is facing the environment; this is called “First-person point of view”, which limits contextual information on the surroundings. Games that use a Third person point of view become spaces that surround as opposed to one that is in front of the player. It provides a sense of physical presence in its virtual environment through a visual embodiment (controlled character). The embodied representation of these elements helps the players to contextualise aspects inside the game's virtual environment, giving the player a richer perception of the world. In a similar way, video games also function as heterotopias. Similar to carpets, video games essentially create an entirely new universe inside the purview of the two-dimensional flat surface.
It is also interesting to note that Eastern-RPG genre heavily relies on mythological stories, whether it’s a loose source of inspiration for character design, game mechanics, worldbuilding or storyline.
Video games are possibly a contemporary iteration of carpets. They are inherently linked and as explained earlier, both share analogous technologies; weaving and computing. Therefore some games share a distinct aesthetic similarity to the carpet as both rely on a grid/pixel system.
Just like with any digital media, video games have the potential to transgress borders and travel beyond rules and regulations. Certain game consoles didn’t make their way to Iraq until much later. When they did, for example, the Playstation 1’s were bootlegged systems which made it possible for anyone with access to the internet to download any game and burn it on CD’s. Markets in Bab Al Sharqi in the 2000’s flourished with self burned CD’s and it was up to the seller to choose which game they wanted to distribute. There was one seller I always begged my Dad to take me to, because he would sell those niche Japanese anime-esque video games, which were derived from the Eastern games earlier mentioned. Vendors rarely dared to stock those niche games because they were not as popular as products similar to FIFA and Tekken.
Since the 2000’s, the video game medium has further developed along with advanced technologies. With open source game engines like Unity and Godot, the possibility of self-publishing changed the whole industry. This and the multiplication of distribution and platforms (this being smartphones, PC’s, Mac os, and Linux) has opened up new ways to approach video games.
The video game as a potential tool to share knowledge
Taking my diasporic experience in consideration, I arrived at the video game medium aware of its potential to transgress borders and velocity of travelling speed. It can also function as a very powerful archival, storytelling and educational tool.
I decided to venture into the self-publishing world to develop a video game interlaced with the Iraqi carpet. Each element present in the game is an animated translation derived from the carpet, from the characters you interact with to the environment presented. For example, the avatar you control is an element I found in a carpet that resembles that of a dancing figure. In translating it into an animation and having it function in the video game, I had to imagine the way this dancing figure would walk, sideways and up and down. What would this character’s back look like? How would its hands and legs move around? How fast would it move? These are questions I take into account when animating the avatar’s idle and walk animation and coding the way it would interact with this digital carpet that is the game level.
The storytelling is in its development phase as I write this. During my artist residency at Morpho Antwerp I am studying the complex histories and folklore that surrounds these carpets.
I believe that storytelling in video games is an aspect that allows for a nuanced understanding of the intricacy present in southern Iraqi carpets. It is capable of conveying visual, oral, symbolic and textual information which can be appealing to young and mature audiences.
The integration of storytelling makes it possible to introduce a glossary of symbols, inviting the player to engage with the stories that each symbol from a carpet bears. At the same time, it roots those stories in their specific histories, allowing them to have new meanings today, therefore, creating and giving them a new temporality.