Reading performance
Giulia Crispiani, Golrokh Nafisi and Ahmadali Kadivar, Rome March 2019
The Garden of a Continuous City is public reading with Giulia Crispiani, and Ahmad Kadivari, conceived for the Botanic Garden of the city of Rome, meant for eight specific locations inside the garden in Trastevere. The audience was invited for a walk to salute the incoming spring, and to witness a conversation on cities and gardens, preservation and variety, read by two voices. Passing through the most suggestive locations, from the Japanese bamboo garden to the plain overlooking the city, the itinerary ended in one of the greenhouses, where the work Absent/Present was installed above an hand-drawn map of the garden, and a third voice sang an Egyptian revolutionary song.
The duration of the gathering was of approximately one hour.
From the text:
“This is a city that was made by a traveller. In Farsi, a mosafer, the traveller, does safar. She travels. The mosafer always returns, even when she remains somewhere else for years, she records what she sees always in her mother language. Once upon a time, the mosafer came back to Rome and built this city inside her own city.”
“- Once upon a time, before the towers came, the streets of Beirut would smell of Jasmine. If you close your eyes you can still imagine it. Now, trees grow inside the abandoned houses, or beside abandoned cars.
– In Cairo, the trees are never fully green, as they are always covered with a thin layer of sand. Cairo is the outpost to the desert. When you stand on an island in the middle of the Nile, you remember the cradle of civilization. Some of the plants there must have witnessed it.
– And when standing in Revolution street in Tehran, I thought that its trees have witnessed the revolution.”
