Evacuation operations from Afghanistan to take out of the country eligible civilians and their families are continuing, but not without debates and clashes as the final deadline is looming. The date set to complete the operations is indeed 31st August, but some countries such as the UK and Norway have recently asked to extend the operations, something that is unlikely as it would not be tolerated by the Taliban. The civilian section of the airport in Kabul is currently shut and the evacuation depends solely on the US military operation being maintained.
At the moment Kabul International Airport is a very different place from what the British Vogue team found in 1969 when they arrived in Afghanistan for a reportage that was later published in the December 1969 issue and that looked at Afghanistan as an exotic destination, perfect for Western expatriates and hippies.
Fascinated by the country, the desert and the mountainous villages and interested in faraway cultures, Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) first travelled to Afghanistan in 1971.
Part of his interest in Afghanistan also came from an ancestor who lived in the 18th century, Giovanni Battista Boetti, a Dominican monk and a rebel. Sent to Mosul to serve as superior of the Apostolic Mission of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, Giovanni Battista Boetti abandoned his creed and converted to Islam founding a Sufi sect, assuming the name of Sheikh Mansur.
When he first visited Afghanistan, Alighiero Boetti had started developing an interest in politics, geography and maps and during his first trip to Kabul he brought with him two squares of fabric and commissioned embroiderers to create an intricate tapestry simply stating "11 luglio 2023 - 16 dicembre 2040" (11th July 2023 - 16th December 2040; the diptych represented the date of his predicted death and of his 100th birth anniversary). The embroidered pieces soon turned into the beginning of a new body of works and a new adventure. Boetti started travelling back and forth to Afghanistan at least twice a year till 1979, often with his family in tow.
While in Kabul, he would stay at the One Hotel, a guest house he had helped funding in the residential area of Sharanaw. Directed by the young Gholam Dastaghir, the One Hotel had 11 rooms, a restaurant and a garden where visitors, usually hippies and Indian and Pakistani carpet traders, could drink chai and smoke dope. For Boetti the One Hotel was his home and studio, though, and it was here that he met Salmani Ali, who became his assistant, and it was at the hotel that he conceived his embroidered maps of the world. Ali, originally from the Hazara village of Jaghori, prepared chai at the hotel and introduced Boetti to two embroiderers, Fatima and Abiba.
Local craftswomen turned into Boetti's collaborators throughout the '70s: Boetti stated he provided the idea that was then executed by others (a concept he had taken from Sol LeWitt’s 1967 "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art"). Working in local villages such as Istalif, these women helped him creating his first maps of the world and later on his compositions with letters.
Boetti's maps represented a flattened globe with all the continents and nations characterised by the colours and designs of their flags. The first "Mappa" was produced in the autumn of 1971 and more followed: Boetti provided the design and the local artisans would execute them following Boetti's instructions. It took six months for smaller maps, one year for the first large map. Usually the artist would see for the first time the finished works when they were sent back to Italy.
So, rather than living a merely hedonistic adventure in Afghanistan, Boetti discovered there a new way to make art and also found a friend and collaborator. Salman Ali became indeed his assistant and followed him to Rome where he helped running his studio and became a member of the artist's family and a connoisseur of Boetti's art.
The One Hotel closed down after a few years, before the Soviet invasion; in 1979 Boetti and Ali went back to Kabul to oversee the production of new works, but Afghanistan was changing. Boetti managed to go back to Italy; Ali remained behind and returned to Italy via Iran only two years later. From Italy Boetti and Ali supported Afghanistan sending financial aid to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Afghan resistance fighter and leader of the mujahideen, but also shipping shoes to Massoud's soldiers on the mountains of the Panjshir Valley.
Boetti’s weavers continued to work on his maps from Pakistani refugee camps after the Soviet invasion in 1979: the new maps they did depicted tense political realities and one tapestry entitled "Soviet Exodus with Poppies" included tanks and weapons. The maps continued being produced till Boetti's death in 1994; after his death Boetti's son Matteo collected the final map in Pakistan and paid severance to the weavers and families of artisans that had worked for his father for two decades.
Boetti's embroidered maps are particularly significant in our politically and complex times: Boetti used the map format to prompt people to ponder about issues of national self-definitions, but in some cases his tapestries turn the world into a flat territory in which affinities and differences poetically coexist in a melting pot; at others they become historical documents that remind us the world has rapidly changed throughout the decades, as some of the countries embroidered in Boetti's colourful tapestries were disintegrated or have changed flags.
With the current situation in Afghanistan it is sad to admit that is seems difficult if not impossible to think about Western artists who may one day go back to work in Afghanistan like Boetti did, combining the themes of travel and nomadism with the concept of multi-cultural collective collaboration and achieving a balance between conceptualism and humanism thanks to those families of Afghan artisans and refugees who made his works.
Image credits for this post
All images copyright and courtesy Archivio Alighiero Boetti
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