My grandmother used to sell Persian carpets when I was a kid in Palermo. I remember helping her and my parents rolling them up after a client visit and being fascinated by their intricate patterns and colors. I had no idea what they represented, but they always looked to me like mysterious secret gardens of some ancient civilization, maybe the garden where a prince would secretly meet his lover or perhaps the garden was actually designed specifically for her, and it represented her perfect beauty; or maybe I was staring at a divine garden from a parallel reality, in the afterlife or in a metaphysical place where you can only go in your sleep or smoking some special strong opium pipe. I didn’t know any of their meaning, but my mind wandered around the drawings and kept dreaming of them in the many years to come.

In 2006 while writing a review for a retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark work on Anarchitecture, I discovered that the artist was fascinated by small pieces of land, often in between buildings, too small and too weird to have any value. He was so attracted by them that he actually purchased a few with the idea of maybe developing a project in the future. Unfortunately, he died way too young for this to happen and I don’t believe there is even a record of what he had in mind for them.

The idea stuck in my head and I started imagining what you can actually do with a long strip of land maybe one-foot-wide and 50-feet-long. I got obsessed with it and started imagining small magical gardens growing on them, like the wildflowers that grow in total loneliness in the cracks of the pavement in our cities.

A few years later, a very nice, gentle man stopped by my office in Brooklyn, offering to make rugs in Nepal. He had come all the way from there to find work and somehow ended up in my office. I immediately accepted, thinking that my grandmother would be proud of me, and all these memories came down rushing their way into the paper. I started imagining weird pieces of land, with unusable shapes, crushed between buildings or fences, almost like open wounds of our modern urban development. I imagined the gardens to be like band-aids on our cities, just like the magical gardens designed for the astonishing beauty of the prince’s girl. A place where nature would win back its space, slowly, with a delicate but firm touch. Then I started thinking that each piece would extend to the next and then the next, always in between demising walls, concrete floors, fences, the back of a house, the side wall of a garage… like trap doors to another world.

The Non-Flying Carpet is handmade by professional artisans in Nepal, and it is the first modular carpet of its kind. With uniquely shaped pieces that fit together like a puzzle, it recreates a courtyard indoors.

This is a made to order item. Lead time varies between 2 to 4 months