Looking at the brick pattern you co-opted, first, I was struck with my own familiarity with the design, and I thought to myself, “how did this design cross the Atlantic”, it looked like every other pattern I knew in the East. “Could be a Moorish-Spanish connection?, or just a design driven by the pressing need to have more air flowing through during a hot tropical summer afternoon”.
To me, the design looked like a good cousin to every brick design I have seen growing up the Red Sea port of Saukin. It bears the same genes that makes most of the mosques windows, doors and mazahah in the ancient port of Suakin. During my school years, these bricks were ubiquitously present, I would stare through a classroom window that has a similar design bricks, my family would sit in verandahs during hot afternoons that are surrounded with short walls built with the same bricks.
Thinking about your invite to dialogue with the piece and while in Istanbul, I thought let’s use the design to make Chris a prayer matte using the brick design as the smallest unit of prayer- as in a Rosary’s first bead. Then, and as good Sufi would say, we repeat the design to invite an enlightenment, as elusive as that can be.
Amir Shingray 2013
