Neoteny

I invite the visitors of Barev Fest to step inside a moving, breathing line of colour.

From the earth rises a 30‑metre river‑cloth, first hugging the ground, then ascending three metres into the sky before falling back in a swift, sudden cascade. The movement of the fabric echoes the shape of a breath—a long, slow inhale rising upward, followed by a sharp exhale releasing back to the ground.

Its surface is saturated with madder—a root that has fed Armenia’s reds for millennia, from Urartian textiles to the carpets of Artsakh. Madder’s alizarin molecules bond with fibre much like our own stories bond with place; both deepen over time. Like a  starting heartbeat, I pre-dye the cloth in a single, quiet tone. Barrels of warm madder liquor and wide brushes stand beside it, inviting every passer‑by to add a stroke. With each gesture the red shifts: rust, cherry, garnet, pomegranate. The installation becomes a communal chromatogram, mapping the festival’s collective pulse in real time.

This work is rooted in the idea of neoteny—a state in which the openness and sensitivity of childhood are carried into adulthood, not lost to it. I understand this not only as a biological condition, but as a celebration of childlike curiosity, flexibility, and playfulness—as a spiritual quality in a world that so often prizes certainty and control. The tension between old and new, between history and presence, mirrors the essence of neoteny itself: the past living on through the present, in an extended state of becoming.

The fabric itself rises, stretches, then falls—like a gesture caught mid-movement, like breath or growth. There’s something organic and evolving about its form, much like the slow, extended development implied by the word neoteny. By engaging with the dye through their own hands, visitors are invited to return—if only briefly—to a state of embodied wonder, where colour is not merely seen but felt, where art begins in the body long before it reaches the mind. As they mark the cloth with their brushes, the fabric continues to “grow” in experience. Through ancient pigment and shared gesture, the installation becomes a living trace of curiosity rediscovered.

The piece asks: How does colour carry memory? How does a single pigment hold so many contradictions—blood and celebration, reckoning and rebirth? It honours natural dyeing as both an ancient technology and a living, sensorial experience—fragile, changeable, deeply rooted in time and place.

In the end the cloth is no longer mine; it is an archive of moments, a red topography authored by hundreds. When the festival closes, I will document and preserve the fabric as evidence that art can still be grown, shared, and re‑rooted in soil—and that breath, like colour, can connect us all.