Formations of a Diasporic Body (2021)

This work began as a laboratory and playground for a collectively imagined pilgrimage across time and space, inspired by my collaborative research project 93 Fragments. Through burned etchings onto wood, analog collage, stop motion, words, sounds, movement and performance, I invited six Iranian friends (artists, healers, dancers) to join me in this work of imagining.  They each sent me a few initial fragments of movement, song and poetry.  I then facilitated, directed, and participated in the return of this fragmented collective body to sacred sites of our ancestral past: abandoned fortresses, remnants of ancient towns, Zoroastrian fire temples housing sacred fires that have been burning for thousands of years. In these imagined spaces, we engaged in an embodied archeological process, unearthing pieces of ourselves, of each other, of lost connections to homeland and belonging. The work resulted in an exhibition of video and mixed media works, a live performance, a collective conversation and a film. 

A Collective Conversation

The Setting: drawings in pyrography

To imagine a world where this pilgrimage would be possible, I began by burning the outlines of some of the architecture onto wood, creating environments for the stop motion. Many of the reference images I used to make these drawings are what I think of as colonial material - photos from a Danish archeology student’s blog, aerial images by a Swiss photographer taken just months before the Revolution in 1978, video footage of the sites from ‘The Human Studies Film Archives’ at The Smithsonian Institution, etc. I think of these mixed media works - and this process - as an act of reclamation.

Imprints / Shadows: mixed media works on wood