“Carpet” explores memory and the idea of home through the fragile connection between early childhood recollections and the experience of forced migration.
Memory: Spring 2002, St. Petersburg, 8 pm, sunset. A Muken mirror and a begonia stand on the windowsill, casting elongated shadows across the carpet in my childhood room.
Present day: Spring 2022, Yerevan. At the same hour and under the same light, the windowsill of a temporary hotel room, a forced new home, remains empty. It casts no shadows. Yet in the golden wedge of the setting sun, memory reconstructs the familiar silhouettes of the mirror and the plant, projecting them again onto a foreign floor.
These shadows, both real and imagined, become fragments of a time when life felt clear, steady and calm. They form delicate links to a childhood home that no longer exists in its former shape. The work examines the shifting threshold between past and present, showing how time softens the contours of memory while still preserving its most significant images. Through this process, the piece attempts to materialize the remaining threads between “then” and “now,” acknowledging and reaffirming the past within a new context.
The artist works with her own memories, seeking to preserve the sensation of home even when the home itself disappears. Through this personal lens, she searches for answers to the questions: What defines a home? Is it a material space, or the immaterial traces held in the mind, the shadows of objects and moments that have disappeared? When we leave familiar walls behind, what do we continue to carry with us?
The object is created as a karpet, the Armenian term for non-pile woven rugs. Both the technique and the word hold deep historical resonance. Karpet (Armenian կապերտ) was first mentioned in the 5th-century Armenian translation of the Bible. Its root, kap (կապ), means “knot,” “contact,” “connection,” an etymology that reflects a work uniting different times, geographies and states of self. It is believed that the Armenian word later gave rise to the European “carpet.”
In this way, Carpet becomes both a mnemonic object and a symbolic threshold. It belongs simultaneously to the past and the present, linking two rooms, two cities, two temporalities and two versions of the artist. Here, home is not a fixed condition but a state reconstructed through memory, re-created through craft, and sustained by subtle, persistent shadows that follow us across borders.
The work was created in Yerevan, where the idea first emerged. It was produced in a small family-run weaving workshop where the artist learned the traditional craft. The process of making the piece became part of rethinking what home can be, offering a new form of grounding that appeared in a place of forced yet meaningful residence.
