Golrokh Nafisi
Performance/Installation Tehran 2017
Darbast Platform
Curator : Helia Hamedani
Collaborators: Naghmeh HoseinZadeh, Ehsan Abdifar
I moved many times, first from the city that I was born in to Tehran, and then in Tehran between neighbourhoods, and later from Tehran to Amsterdam, and in that city alone I moved more than six times in eight years. In this constant motion, many are missed and many are found along the way. As a result, Home is not stuck in the past, stable in the now or the imagination of the future which is supposed to come, but Movement itself. Home is always in movement, in constant Displacement. Is this situation a result of a personal choice? Or it is a collective forced situation that happened to include me as well, a collective situation whose links to those around me I only perceived in glimpses over the yeas? How much our movements and changes between different homes, neighborhoods and even countries dictated by our own desires versus by larger social, economic, and even political trends far beyond our control?
Displacement is a participatory performance installation that it is formed by information given by members of the audience about the different Houses that they lived in during different points in their lives. One of the performers finds the addresses in the google map and calculates the distances between them, while the other one draws the path of moving on the map, and sews them as layers upon the map with a transparent piece of fabric. In the end, each of the participants has an individual map of his various movements between places and the overall distances between places that he has moved in between, allowing the participant to consider their own trajectories of movement in their lives within the landscape of the city in all of its changes and flows in recent history.
On the last day of the performance, in an installation of all the hanging maps, a meeting took place between the artist and the curator and the two other lecturers from different social sciences background. The conversation between these four lecturers opens the conversation between the audience as well.
You can watch a short video of this work here.
