My Kilometre
My kilometer is the smallest distance between my first home and where I call home now. Usually when you hear a kilometer you think about a long distance, maybe a long walk or at least a couple minutes of driving, but for me a kilometer is actually really really tiny, compared to how far I’ve come, how far I’ve traveled. I wrote this little thing in my notebook the other day: I’ve taken millions of steps, from east, to west, from south, to north. I feel the wounds, I’m walking on them. I think in that moment, I felt all the pain that comes from being away. Away to me means that I can’t go back. That even if I do, I can’t call it home anymore. I wonder where my home is now. Like a traveller that never finds home.
I wasn’t allowed to go and visit my family, my friends and my home for the past holidays. All I had left was to visit my neighbourhood on google maps, try to remember what it looked like before I left a year and a half ago.
My kilometer is 1 out of 9932.
For my video projects, I had tons of ideas, and as I was discussing it with my boyfriend, we kept thinking of more and more ideas. One of the first Ideas I had, especially for the One Shot video, was to start painting myself a certain color, and don’t stop until I have covered all of my body. And of course the color that I was imagining was red, just because life feels that way. I don’t know if it’s the experience of living as a woman, or a human, or even an animal or something else, but red has always illustrated my emotions very well. I don’t know how to exactly put it, but red has pain, but also persistence, and strength. Red reminds me of the exact moment when I feel the first drop of period blood. And what a beautiful, majestic experience it is. I’m just realizing as I’m writing this, how amazing of an experience it is, even the pain. In my experience, I have the worst pain right before my blood flows out. It feels powerful, to be able to stand up, go out, work, study, create while I’m going through this pain. And there comes the persistence, it’s just so beautiful how humans can adapt and fight through every obstacle that comes their way, just to stay alive. It’s all just animal instinct, but we humans bleed and break and fall and drown, but find the way out. At least most of the time.
Red reminds me of blood, of anger, of passion, and of love.
But unfortunately that idea was just a bit too messy, so we started trying different ideas we had. One of the ideas I liked to look into was peeling fruit. Especially for my Sequence video, I wanted to start from an easy fruit to peel, like a banana or a clementine, and maybe work my way up to a watermelon , or even a coconut. Of course all of them were supposed to be peeled with bare hands.
I also thought about filming the movement of specific parts of my body when I’m breathing, like my shoulders, or my stomach, or my chest. Breathing is an interesting exercise, and we do it without even thinking too much of it. We inhale, separate and absorb some little thing called oxygen, turn it to a useless (to us) other little thing and send it on its way. It all happens in a couple seconds, and so we have done that billions and billions of times without even acknowledging it. Again, animal instincts that come without even thinking or noticing are just fascinating.
As my loop video, we have this little quirky thing we do when there’s a tiny bit of a joint left. We put it backwards in our mouth, so the lit part is actually super close to our tongue, and then blow it through our mouth and the other person gets really close and inhales the smoke we just blew. Anyway, that was a funny thing to do as a loop. It’s also kinda awkward to get that close to someone if you’re not really close to them, emotionally, but that’s kind of a party trick for me. Always breaks the ice when your nose is almost touching a stranger nose while you’re blowing smoke in their face.
all of these ideas are something I will definitely pursue, but we had an enlightenment when we saw this fox trap my boyfriend had hung up on his wall. We grabbed the fruits and started experimenting this little old trap.
Then we found the chest.
How To Not Set A Trap (One Shot)
Peel My Banana (A Loop)
Snapping Turtle (A Sequence)
On September 16th, 2022, while traveling with family to visit Tehran, a girl named Mahsa Amini was brutally beaten to death by the morality police. What’s that, you ask? They are a group of police that their job is to kidnap women in daylight and take them to this building, and keeping them hostage until their dads, or husbands, or honestly any man show up and bring the woman “proper clothes” and then the woman sign some papers against herself like she’s a dangerous criminal, and hopefully then she can leave.
It wasn’t an overnight accident that got people angry, in fact for around 45 years, people have been silenced, especially women, and if they spoke up they were brutally killed. In 2019, in a span of 3 days, the government of Iran killed more than 1500 people, because they were protesting. How did nobody hear about it? They shut down the internet for a whole week. Imagine not even being able to use google. Anyway, after Mahsa Amini was killed, people, especially women once again became furious. They started protesting, and of course, the government started killing people again.
This piece is called 190 days, because in the past 190 days, women stood up and men, finally stood beside them. But unfortunately, we lost so many brave souls. The first part of the audio is an edited version of the siren that was played when Iran and Iraq were in a war and Iran was under attack. The woman says: “This is a red status warning, it is time for revolution.”
The crying, mourning voices that come after are all from women who experienced the loss of their loved ones, because the government killed them. In the past 190 days, this is how every person has felt.
190 Days (audio project)
This is my cigarette project. As soon as I heard about the project and watched the videos and pictures with the class, I knew exactly what I wanted to do.
As you can probably tell, I smoke, and I smoke a lot, at least more than a non-smoker. Each cigarette I smoke has a story behind it, a character. There are a few things that a cigarette shows me about myself. When did I smoke that cigarette? How did I light it up? Where were I when I smoked it? How many cigarettes did I smoke yesterday? Is it getting more everyday? Were I wearing lipstick? How did I put it out? And considering that I wrote the date and the time on the cigarette, how was I feeling physically? Were I cold and is my handwriting all shaky? Or were I too focused and my handwriting is clean and neat? How long did it take for me to smoke this one? How much was left of my cigarette? These are all questions that lead to at least one answer about me, and I believe it is the most successful self portrait I have created.
I documented 30 cigarettes in 8 days, although I thought it would take me 30 days to smoke it. Each cigarette comes with the date and the time I put it out. Ideally this project was just a demo of a project I will pursue later, and the goal of that project is to document each cigarette I smoke until I quit smoking.
Which one us would go first?
For the Artist’s Button project, I went with a very simple idea. At first I tried to keep all of my buttons together on a long piece of yarn, but the button maker kept cutting my yarn. On the buttons, I spelled out “زن، زندگی، آزادی” which means “Woman, Life, Freedom”. Like the self portrait project, this was a demo of a project I have in mind. To make many sets of this buttons, and to give them away if I travel back to Iran. One button on its own is meaningless and confusing, but if they all come together, they make a powerful connection. Which is very much what we need as Iranians if we want to change the system.
Solidarity
