The 2016 winter collection of Turkestan is a re-edition proposal of the popular and well-known nomadic carpets of Iran: the Gabbehs. In this series we will introduce a set of Kashkuli pieces, the finest Gabbeh category, that shows the level of perfection these rugs have achieved after decades of hard work. Our intention is to turn our gaze towards Iran again and focus on the latest news we have spotted and reviewed from this carpet family.
The Gabbehs are carpets created by the nomadic peoples from the south east of Iran, that is the Lori, Qashqai, Khamseh, Afshari and Bakhtiari communities, that live in the Zagros mountains. Traditionally, these tribes have woven this sort of carpets for their own use in their everyday life, both for covering the floors of their tents and to keep themselves warm in the cold nights. Many have discussed the origin of the word Gabbeh itself: some state that it comes from the Farsi language for «long hair»; others maintain that it comes from the Turkish word «kabah», meaning «rough» or «coarse».
The Gabbehs stand out among other carpets thanks to their abstract and geometric designs and the lack of ornamentation. The simplicity and power of these compositions specially attracted the Western World’s attention in the 1980s, a decade in which these rugs were rediscovered. Almost no other kind of oriental rug looks so plain and unpredictable as the Gabbeh, nor possesses vibrant motifs and saturated and random colour combinations.
In spite of their minimalistic appearance, the manufacturing process of these tribal carpets is very complex: it starts with the pasture and the shearing of the community’s sheep, carried out by the men; then, the old women of the group develop a handmade process, the spinning of the wools; afterwards, the wool strings are classified and dyed with natural products in giant boiling water tubs; subsequently, the carpets are hand-knotted by the women of the tribe; finally, the finishing processes are performed, such as the stretching, the washing and the levelling of the wool.
To illustrate this collection we have used images from the Zagros mountains in which the nomadic peoples live: desert and mountain views from Iran. To depict the re-edition of this kind of rug, though, we have chromatically modified the photographies to generate impossible sceneries that, like the Gabbeh colour combinations, offer a new perceptive perspective.
