Threads of Memory: Reproducing the Cypress Tree through Sensual Consumption

When dealing with the moving worlds of migration among the Persian diaspora in Australia, memories cannot simply be removed to dusty attic boxes to be stored as an archive. Rather, this analysis takes the body and its sensory engagement with the world as a central focus, arguing that memories are crafted, tasted, smelt and touched in everyday temporalities. In the kitchens and lounges of Persian migrant women the lived past refuses to become undone from the countless revolutions of food, talk and domestic activity that are central to the patterning of memory. In this paper, we argue that these intimate practices have references beyond their domestic dimensions, for they point to a worldly movement of life writ domestically small. It is via a sensory network that the spatially and temporally disparate worlds of homeland and new homes are remembered and forgotten, and where miniature worlds call out to the movement of migration.

craft + design enquiry, 2014

This paper will consider the relationship between the performative nature of craft and the transformation of memory, as exemplified in the work of Elisa Markes-Young. Particular reference will be made to her series The strange quiet of things misplaced (2007-2011), which is based on memories of domestic linen from her Eastern European childhood. This discussion offers a provisional reading of the series, relating to the concepts of craft, material and memory, and considers how devices like encounter and mimicry can elicit both memory and improvisational craft practices. Markes-Young, who has no formal training in traditional textile techniques, describes her process as a literal activation of memory through making, giving rise to the question: 'Can the techniques of material practice provide the means for not only creation and reflection, but also an altogether new "encounter" between the artist and her work: occasioning both new works and enriched memories?' Such a proposal contrasts with the popular conception of artists drawing on memory to inspire their artworks: here, it is suggested, memory is encountered, activated, and enhanced by physical and conceptual craft practice.

Arts, 2021

The paper explores the multisensory artistic practices of the Polish artist Anna Królikiewicz, in which the sense of taste is pivotal as a medium of memory. Królikiewicz relies on tastes and smells to restore the memory of past moments, places, and people and to give life to the dead. Królikiewicz’s method is unique in that she abandons the exclusively cognitive mode of remem-bering, promoted by ocularcentrism, which distinctively pervades our culture. The artist aspires to stimulate sometimes anemic memory to compose from scratch an image of a place that is strongly marked by the presence of its previous dwellers. She does not propose a cognitive dialog or intel-lectual processing of sensory data; instead, she constructs a relationship ensuing from emotional and empathetic processes. She inquires into the nature of perception, modes of remembering, and possibilities to foster a community around the table. Once-alive existences resurface in Królikie-wicz’s pieces in the form of sensory traces. Her works are on-site experimentations in which the relations between tasting and recollecting are studied. The paper focuses on two site-specific in-stallations—How much sugar? and The Drugstore—where taste is relied on to build tunnels of memory connecting the contemporary residents of Sopot and Gdansk to the Germans who inhab-ited the two cities before the WW2.

univie.ac.at

(for images from referenced album, see: http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/311885), 2017

This essay analyzes the use of traditional costume and foreign dress seen in "An Album of Artists' Drawings from Qajar Iran." Though it, I address questions of temporality, modernity, and memory in a period of dynamic change in nineteenth-century Iran. I examine the varied source material for these costume designs circulating in Iran. I explore how Qajar artists negotiated their relationship between a visibly composite past and their outward-facing present. Since the accompanying facsimile could not be uploaded here, the full album discussed in the essay is available online at Harvard Art Museums (http://www.harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/311885)

Histories of Ornament:From Global to Local, Gülru Necipoğlu and Alina Payne eds., 2016

Granthaalyah Publication and Printers, 2023

The visual language and narrative of a traditional embroidery is par excellence. It carries with it folklores which have transcended from generation to generation with its exquisiteness. One such embroidery is of the Lambanis or the Banjaras, also referred to as the Indian Gypsies. Their embroidery connotes a semiotic system for communicating and interpreting various colours, patterns, stitches, surface embellishments and it has within it a hidden language that is made up of a collection of cultural symbols that communicate on various social and psychological levels. Embroidery is a complete language connoting a semiotic system for communicating and interpreting various colours, patterns, stitches, surface embellishments. The Lambanis have inherited a rich folk tradition of embroidery with exquisite patterns and a voluminous stitch vocabulary. The surface additives added to their embroidery incorporate myriad elements like the mirror(shisha), shells(cowries), beads, applique work, rustic coins, and metal buttons. The exceptional and meticulous utilization of these create a story par excellence. The surface additives utilized in the Lambani culture connotes various aspects of their culture and though used as an extra element along with the embroidery their function is beyond ornamentation and carry several meanings. This paper is an attempt by the researcher to understand, interpret and decode the reasons behind incorporating these surface additives in the embroidery to finally create a masterpiece. The paper also extrapolates on the researcher's travel experiences to various pockets of India where the Lambanis have settled and her inferences of their embroidery in terms of the embellishments, stiches, patterns, and finesse.

Late medieval convents in the Low Countries saw the emergence of a unique form of mixed-media art, involving recycled and readymade items that, in a very specific way, articulated the feminine devotional identity and maintained a layered relationship with sacral topography. By wrapping the stone and bone fragments in fine textiles, the nuns lifted these objects out of their inert mundanity so that they came to represent, instead, vigorous life itself. In the present article, I approach the topic of Enclosed Gardens from a broad perspective that combines a variety of methodologies with a view to attaining a renewed understanding of these exceptional pieces of cultural heritage. I deal with the gardens consecutively as a symbolisation of Paradise and the mystical union, as a sanctuary for interiorisation, as a sublimation of the sensorium (particularly smell), as a web of handwork, as an example of tectonics that touch upon the longue durée of the lozenge, and finally as a pars pro toto for the sublimated eros and the phantasma of the nest.

Abstract:

Herald of Social Sciences, 2021

In the context of cultural memory and its transfer, the essay of Ghevond Alishan "Under the fir tree. Reflections in the bosom of a deserted nature" can be interpreted on the basis of considering the text as a cultural memory extended in time. In the space o time, Alishan creates his vision (image) of memory. Alishan connects cultural memory with the present, which is an endless cosmic time. Meantime, he notes the ontological precondition of memory, since it is its carrier. In that present, the time, which encompasses and accumulates the space-time dimensions of the past and future, is revealed. In this particular essay (of Ghevond Alishan), memory as a phenomenon is also considered in the context of intertextual and post-structuralism theories. Such interpenetration of memory plays a very constructive role in terms of further research on the time-text-memory triad. Therefore, the proposition that cultural memory is a non-passive creative reserve turns the information obta...