Gardens Around the World - Gallery Book

Pascale Goldenberg (Hrsg)
168 pages, hardcover, thread binding
in English, German, French

»GARDENS AROUND THE WORLD« DOCUMENTS A UNIQUE INTERCULTURAL EXCHANGE PROJECT: SENDING TEXTILE WORKS ABOUT THE TOPIC OF “GARDEN” ON A JOURNEY ACROSS THE WORLD TO BE CRAFTED BY FOUR HANDS WAS THE BASIC CONCEPT. THERE WERE THREE STAGES TO THIS ADVENTURE: EUROPE – AFGHANISTAN – EUROPE.

The starting point was an invitation to participants across Europe inviting them to submit textile designs in A3 format presenting their ideas of gardens. To these designs, embroiderers in Afghanistan reacted with their own personal supplements. All the participants were at liberty to design the pieces in their individual styles.

In December 2015, a jury selected 72 of the European works submitted. These works in progress were flown to Afghanistan in February 2016 and distributed to the embroiderers to be continued. Their ideas of gardens and aesthetic concepts – sometimes very different – were expressed in these works. After that, the pieces were returned to their European creators to be continued and finished according to their own ideas. Some of them decided not to change anything; some added parts here and there; still others “dug up” whole garden again.

The gallery book “Gardens Around the World” does not only present the finished pieces, but reveals the single steps in the creation of each of them, a process scarcely to be guessed at in many cases. The results show how people from completely different backgrounds enter into an exciting dialogue through the language of textile art. Numerous colourful images of details make this book into a walk in a botanical garden of the textile arts.