NO SHOES ON THE CARPET 2024

NO SHOES ON THE CARPET

MFA Contextual Design
@designacademyeindhoven
Photo: @femke_reijermanstudio

Despite the high demand for Persian carpets in the Western world, there is a stark difference in how these carpets are treated within the private spaces of their diasporic cultural context compared to public and private spaces outside of it. The defacing of the carpet through neglect and mistreatment results in the shortening of its lifespan and breaking of its cultural generational contract of care and inheritance. Ultimately, it harbors an underlying violence that is an instrument for the erasure of otherness in the form of whitewashing. 

NO SHOES ON THE CARPET aims to build a bridge between Iranian culture in Iran and the diaspora, using the carpet as a possible link and illustrating its emancipatory potential. Rather than presenting the marginality of the carpet in the Western space as a state of victimhood, the project treats it as a space of resistance, creativity, and liberation. Proposing to look at how we can reclaim and maintain our cultural agency in the making of carpets as a cultural practice.

The making of the carpet becomes a methodology to claim space without paying the fee of assimilation.