The symbol of the Turkmen carpet is shown in the Sochi project “Clay without borders”
October 26, 2017 | 00:12 |779
This project impresses not with its size, but with more than a thousand of elements. So many people molded them. And we can say that they are representatives of almost all corners of the globe. The creative project “Clay without borders” became one of the most popular at the World Festival of Youth and Students, which was recently held in Sochi. Each participant of the festival was given the opportunity to pick up a piece of clay.Leonid KIYASHKO
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Someone molded a native pattern, someone a figure, and someone a model of a monument of architecture. Such as our Uzbek friends did. And we molded carpet pattern and fabric ornament, which is known to Turkmen and other people as “oriental cucumber”.
There was a place on the giant platforms, which here were called “islands”, for each clay element. And these objects from clay were attached on the platforms by professional ceramic artists. Alexander Stvora, one of the authors of this multicultural project, helped us to do it.
“The material we are working on requires attention and great respect,” says the ceramist. “If it gets into the hands of kind-hearted people, and if people are filled with some thoughts, they can always leave their feelings in this piece of clay. When we hold it in our hands, pug, and put our consciousness into clay, it filled with us. As a result, it turns out such an energy exchange.”
Thinking about the project, our interlocutor and her like-minded fellow Natalia Bodrikova, realized that a lot of people will pass through the creative workshop of the festival.
“We thought for a long time how we can organize a common activity of people from different countries, representing different confessions, speaking different languages. Moreover, most of them hold clay for the first time in life. So, they have some fears of this material and they are not sure if they could do it or not. We decided to imagine such a name “Clay without Borders.” The most wonderful thing is that people do not need to have knowledge of foreign languages, because here we start talking with our hands.
Alexandra assures us that there was not a single person who would have pugged clay, got up and left:
“Every participant can rich his own result. For someone, this is an opening and he will want to continue modeling more than once. We did not expect that our overall composition will be changed with every new element added to it.
Many of compositions are considered by the authors of the project the real masterpieces, because they “show the mood, the inner world of a person”.
“Life here begins to boil due to this,” says Alexandra Stvora. “Islands” are associated with fish, turtles, mountains, continents. People can walk near the compositions, each time finding something new. You could see different compositions every fifteen minutes, in one place a tree suddenly grown, a flower appeared, and in another place a bird flew in and built its nest.
We molded the ornament of the Turkmen carpet out of clay. Alexandra likes it. Like the patterns of tahia, which we give her as a souvenir. In the collection of the ceramist, by the way, there are already fifteen national headdresses, including headdresses from the countries of the East. And in fact, no one is collecting dust on the shelf. Trying different headdresses, the craftsman draws inspiration.
Turkmen tahia was suitable for sculptor Andrei Krivolapov, creating amazing compositions of flexible transparent plastic and ordinary twine, which could be threaded into the holes by everyone. We saw a voluminous graphic art. The object was in the form of a harp, similar at the same time to the wooden bird of happiness of Pomors and to the suspension bridges.
Each participant of the creative workshops of the festival became the builder of this world and did not prevent anyone else from doing it. After all, no one here defended their borders: everybody felt good in one space.
In the future, the resulting composition will be transferred to another material. First scanned, creating a three-dimensional model, and then it will be cast in bronze, creating a monument that will become the heritage of the festival. There are a lot of suitable places in Sochi, where the monument could be raised.
