Edible Carpet

A rolling, flying oriental carpet consisting of lettuce, some edible flowers, spices and other vegetables. The carpet will change during the summer when new flowers come up and as the crops grow. You are welcome to pick! But “pick finely”, take a salad leaf here and there, not the whole plant. You may want to remove certain flowers so the carpet stays fine!

In Des espaces autres (1967), which means other areas in Swedish, French philosopher Michel Foucault uses the mat and the garden as examples of what he means by heterotopia. The carpet becomes a symbol for traveling around the world.

For the Persians gardens were a holy place, a kind of microcosm of a closed rectangle, joining four parts symbolizing the four corners of the world. Between these four corners of the garden, at the center they placed the fountain that was the holiest of all. The carpet showed the garden’s microcosm in its patterns. It was simply a kind of roll-up garden; movable through time and space.

At the same time, the garden itself could be perceived as a rug in which the whole world was represented in uniform symbolic perfection. In this way, both the carpet and the garden symbolized a miniature of the world, while also being the whole universe. The garden, like the carpet, serves as a concrete place for the imaginary, for the imagined. Thought about this way, the fairy magic carpet becomes a symbol of our imagination.

Åsa Maria Bengtsson
Sweden