2024-01-14 19:35:28
Outside the window: a Berlin street intersection in winter, old buildings, new buildings, gray sky. Inside: a pile of carpets on the hall floor. Yellow, red, colorful, more carpets on the shelf, rolled up in cotton covers, and on the wall, like a painting, a beige example with black accents. The carpets feel thick and dense, nice and soft when you stand on them barefoot.
From up here, on the fourth floor of an old building in Kreuzberg, 29-year-old Hannah Vagedes supplies the world with hand-knotted carpets that look just as good vertically as horizontally. Vagedes is co-founder of Maison Rhizomes and wants to carve out a niche in the market for the young company. The core business is artist’s carpets: the pieces translate an artistic work into knots made of wool, silk or linen. They are knotted in factories in Nepal and India. The carpets will soon be on display in exhibitions in Paris and Berlin.
Panting, Vagedes heaves rolls of carpet across the room and pulls off the covers. She would like to demonstrate all the models, even if it is tiring. Your enthusiasm for the carpets is clearly noticeable. “I am 100 percent convinced of it,” she says. Although she doesn’t earn as much as she did in her previous job, she can make a living from it.
Just go to Brittany
The story of Maison Rhizomes began at around 2000 meters in the Himalayas, in the Nepalese city of Pokhara. There, Vagedes happened to meet the Belgian artist Charlotte Culot during a sabbatical in 2019. The two spent two days together, and when they said goodbye they said: Let’s see each other again.
Photo gallery
Maison Rhizomes: Fabrics on fabrics
Back in Germany, in her position as fashion director at the clothing retailer Breuninger, Vagedes began to have doubts. Too much consumption, the job is too fast-paced. Without a plan B, she left the company in May 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and shortly afterwards went to Charlotte Culot in Brittany.
“I didn’t come back for a year and a half,” says Hannah Vagedes and laughs. She worked on a neighboring Demeter farm, helped Charlotte Culot in the studio and supported her with administrative work. This also included organizing the production of carpets. Culot had recently started having carpets made based on her paintings. She was inspired to do this by a tapestry by the architect Le Corbusier. Starting your own company with the carpets came about gradually, says Vagedes.
Carpets as art
She moved to Berlin and built her first collection from Culot’s designs. The second collection was recently released, in collaboration with the French painter Ludovic Philippon. Further collections with other artists are to follow. The carpets are limited to 22 pieces per model; Maison Rhizomes sells them directly and through a few dealers in Europe, the USA and Australia.
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Vagedes runs his hands over a light carpet by Charlotte Culot, matt surfaces in different shades of beige collide and overlap. The pile heights of the various surfaces differ minimally; a relief becomes visible in the side light. Culot’s signature is attached to the edge. Depending on the model, there are 100 or 150 Nepalese knots per square inch, the official unit of measurement for the craft.
“Carpets are long-lasting, they can be passed down from generation to generation,” she says. “For us they are art objects. They change the feeling of space, they have an effect on people.” Her next goal: open her own showroom for Maison Rhizomes. And finally travel back to Nepal, where the story began.
The carpets from Maison Rhizomes can be seen from January 25th to February 14th at Studio BvdL in Berlin.
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