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Immemorial
19th to 21st January 2022,
Objects are the first human-made materials, but they keep on living without the human race. Sometimes we store them for years and care for them. Sometimes we let go of them and throw them away. Sometimes we leave some in a place that always stands before our eyes. Sometimes we take our eyes off them. In any case, they are enviably self-sufficient and needless of us.
I have a box wherein I put my father's keepsakes; a half-empty drink bottle with traces of his lips, the perfume that smells like him, his watch, whose strap color has faded over time by brushing against his wrist, his last cigarette in his last pack of cigarettes, a piece of his handwriting. These things have been living in the closet for years. Although I dare not go to them, touch and look at them. The things he touched, looked at, threw into a corner, or passed by indifferently before his death; lifeless objects that make the most lifelike impressions on me. They are documents from my father's life. They used to belong to him. Now I have them in my possessions, which gives me a sense of closeness to him.
Objects sometimes accentuate a person's presence, sometimes remind and emphasize their absence. These left objects flow through time and connect us without speaking our language. But objects convey not only humans and their personal lives but also cultures; they are simultaneously evidence of our social life form and its architects. They do not solely establish a relationship among human beings; they establish relationships between humans and non-humans and above that between themselves. Every object has a story. They have concealed something in themselves and kept it alive. But what is the quality of the immediate presence of that object without considering its implications, without knowing its history and its past? What do unrelated objects do when they get together in a space they do not belong to?
In this lab, I try to create a new relationship between objects by gathering the old and new, obsolete and commonly used objects, undone or perfect, a relationship different from their monetary worth. The function of this lab is to bestow space and time to objects.
This piece pursues the path made by
the Sun Sets Eight Times A Day project.
In that virtual workshop, I put the objects I had found around in different compositions and proportions. Here, I try to estimate their power of expression and the quality of their interactions based on objects' predictable or unpredictable gestures: slipping, scrubbing, immobility, stillness, disobedience, or steadiness. And I tried to be more of an observer and less of a leader in forming their visual narrative.
By Azade Shahmiri
In collaboration with Leila Ahmadi Abadeh
Videos selected from the digital garden’s creations by The Sun Sets Eight Times A Day fellow artists:
Youness Atbane, Lucy Ellinson, Maya Zbib, Lydia Ziemke
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