This short essay as well as a research display made for the exhibition focuses on the various historical attempts to catalogue Central Asian, mostly Uzbek, ornaments in architecture, in carpets, suzani, and other objects of applied arts. These attempts were made by late-Imperial and Soviet researchers, archaeologists, and restorers. Cataloguing, as a practice, always offers a particular way of ordering items and has a political dimension and consequences in the imperial context. Moreover, I’m interested in diverse modes of movement inherent in ornaments: body movement, chronological movement, geographical movement, and movement of imagination. As a scholar not native to the region and an amateur collector myself, I draw a connection between these movements and the desire to collect. To do this, I explore an akhta (in Uzbek, “axta”) – an object and a technique that is crucial for reproducing and creating the ornament. 

Where does ornament lead?

An ornament orders space and one’s trajectory within it. Ornaments can instruct our bodies how to move or, sometimes, not to move. As with architecture itself, ornaments implement a certain politics of the body: an eyeball moves uncontrollably as it sees and follows the ornamental lines, and other organs might follow too. One sees the ornament – their hand is reaching for the curves, and the corpse is moving ahead. The starting point of this chain of reactions is the affection caused by the ornament and its inner dynamic. Another dynamic quality of an ornament is that it is potentially reproductive as it contains the inner laws of its creation in itself, like a DNA fragment in a cell. In this sense, an ornament is never-ending, it always reproduces itself and can be continued from any point because its every dot is a point for a new departure. This characteristic deals with the reproductive power of an ornament. 

Another feature of ornaments is that, in the globalized world, we often tend to perceive and describe some of them as the most distinctive markers of belonging to a certain culture. To put it boldly, one might imagine something most likely absolutely chimerical under the label of the “Egyptian” or “Greek” ornament. This effect deals with the Orientalist worldview that gave birth to the architecture of historicism and eclectism in modern history. Another related process is the rise of national imaginations supported by cultural production. Thus, a special kind of attachment exists between “the ornament” and “the culture” (or we want it to exist), moreover, ornament often serves as the boldest marker of such belonging. This mechanism often played a cruel joke in architecture. From this perspective, ornament again shows its potential in ordering space but in a different sense: being used as an attribute, it can symbolically attach the space to the imagined signified. In such cases, ornaments perform more like masks or covers, for the viewer’s convenience and to produce a certain impression about the space.  This is a referential power of an ornament. 

Therefore, ornaments are all about movement:

• body movement

• movement in time: to the “ancestors’ age” and back

• geographical movement: to all parts of the world  

• flight of fantasy as a sort of movement of imagination: let’s pretend that we live, say, in Byzantium?

Collecting and cataloguing ornaments

I’m interested in various historical attempts to classify and catalogue Central Asian, including Uzbek, ornaments in architecture, but also carpets, suzani and other objects of applied arts. These attempts were made in colonial and postcolonial contexts by late-Imperial and Soviet researchers, archaeologists, and restorers of different backgrounds, with whose help Central Asian ornaments entered imperial knowledge. I think these inquiries dealt a lot with the four types of movements inherent in ornaments listed above; all of them tried to establish power over movement, curb it and direct it. Without question, numerous such attempts were made, only a few of which сaught my eye.
Cataloguing, as a practice, always offers a particular way of ordering items. Moreover, catalogues were always included in the systems of imperial governance. It contains and classifies knowledge, excludes other knowledge, and provides conditions to produce new knowledge. As Ann Stoler showed, archives must be seen as “monuments of states”, “sites of state ethnography”, a “supreme technology of the late nineteenth-century imperial state, a repository of codified beliefs that clustered (and bore witness to) connections between secrecy, the law, and power” (Stoler, 2002: 87). Thus, collecting and cataloging might be called a cultural technology of rule, colonial in its essence, to borrow the concept coined by Francine Hirsch in her study of Soviet ethnographers in Central Asia (Hirsch, 2005).