The essential privilege of the exile is to have, not just one set of eyes but half a dozen, each of them corresponding to the places you have been… There is always a kind of doubleness to that experience… the more places you have been, the more displacements you’ve gone through, as every exile does. As every situation is a new one, you start out each day anew. Edward Said (1)
It is no surprise that the rug is the privileged medium through which Sara Badr Schmidt expresses her artistic vision. Badr Schmidt’s rugs are not sterile artworks on the wall, nor are they banal floor coverings, but rather they are floating islands that invite inhabitation and interaction: sitting, lying down, reading, conversing, reflecting. A rug delimits space; it is the marking of place, an act of grounding. At the same time, it represents impermanence, as it can be rolled up, transported, and rolled out again somewhere else. The rug is an instrument in the act of boundlessness, boundlessness that does not cut you loose from everything, but rather allows you to be transported and land, lightly but firmly, in another place.
In Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, he equates rugs with gardens: “The garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space.” (2) It is the act of moving that interests us here. Carpets are physical metaphors (from ancient Greek, meta-pherein: to carry over, to transfer) of transposition, of dislocation. The carpet is a movable garden, a transposed place, a rolled-out scroll of memory, a plan of resettlement – all essentials acts of the exiled self.
Sara Badr Schmidt’s rug creations are sometimes commissioned by a client for a specific space, taking into account the physical context of light, colors, views, or furnishings. Other textile works are freer, more intimate and spontaneous, where the language of abstraction communicates a moment in time and place. In rug-making, the gestures of drawing, writing, and painting are translated into weaving, and instants of thought are quite literally given texture and depth, by other hands. In Badr Schmidt’s textile works, words and figures are often woven into the composition, multiplying readings (when one speaks the language) and undermining abstraction with arresting literalism. The combination of languages concrete and abstract provokes readings on different levels, and the deceptively simple escapes easy explanation. In the exhibit “We left home… but what is home” the physical manifestation of language is woven in wool or silk, imprinted on concrete, or painted onto canvas, freezing a memory in a very tactile way and inviting us to touch it.
When you are removed from your first language and first culture, as Edward Said optimistically observed, you start out each day anew. Adaptation is not erasure, loss of native speaking is not silence; you slowly become comfortable with the voids between what you have known and what you will become. Powers of observation are sharpened, memory is not the past but a constantly mitigated present. The flat luminosity of the Mediterranean Sea, the deep cool blue of the Baltic, declinations of green and brown and yellow and pink in the landscape; heavy stone, lighter tiles, fine wood detailing, crisply painted surfaces, fragile or expansive pieces of glass; steps, trees, doors, locks, odors of dampness and dryness, or of the kitchen after dinner. The dispersion of spaces, stairs, and rooms, moving through them, resting, interacting. The play of light and shadow; street, entrance, garden; creaks, bangs and far-off voices. You build yourself a home in your mind, as best you can. Like a snail, you carry it with you.
(1) Edward Said, “The Voice of the Palestinian in Exile” Third Text 3(4), 1988.
(2) Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” AMC, 1984.