2022

Hand-knotted carpet, density 40 knots/10 cm, wool, natural and synthetic dyes, 170x100 cm. Woven in Tsovagyugh (Armenia) by Liana Grigoryan and Gayané Gulanyan, under the supervision of Astghik Amirbekyan.

With the support of Bourse Transverse - ADAGP, FreeLens and Sometimes Éditions.

Vordan Karmir is a collaborative work on the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) war. The artists transform the traumatic images of violence against Armenians, deliberately disseminated by Azerbaijani soldiers on social media as psychological warfare and sent directly to the artists, through a glitch process to reduce their traumatic impact. The created carpet incorporates three glitch medallions and patterns referring to elements of the war, woven with ancestral techniques and a unique pigment derived from cochineal, replacing the historic "vordan karmir" pigment, the red cochineal of the Ararat valley, which is endangered. This collective weaving metaphorizes the ethnic cleansing suffered by the Armenians of Artsakh and operates a collective transformation of trauma.

The process, as important as the rug itself, has been documented in a book published by Sometimes Editions in november 2022.