2026

Two-channel video installation (20:57 min. loop)

Narration:

Every place has its own alphabet, an exclusive language through which it responds to its surroundings. A place tells us whose territory it has been and whom it calls upon. This alphabet defines the spiritual coordinates of a place.

A word dies, another is born, yet the presence of meaning does not disappear.

The cave paintings of Paleolithic humans, depicting animals, are located in the deepest parts of caves. Many believe that humans attributed magical properties to them. They were drawn with the intention of dominating the animal’s body and spirit, confining it within the frame of an image in order to render the animal subject to the territory of the hunt.

The body collapses; memory crawls from one shell to another, from one house to the next.

In the settlement of the displaced, each member of the community, by assembling these objects and changing their function, makes another definition of home possible. As if the reuse of these parts in a new body were a metaphor that brings the dreamer one step closer to possessing what is desired. In this way, those at the margins rehearse “house” and “city.”

The city is in constant motion and transformation, and whatever remains outside this flow is pushed to the margins—people and objects alike, left behind according to fixed criteria. The houses built by slum dwellers are the result of this filtering, revealing the unmasked face of the city at its margins.

Standing atop vast hills of construction debris makes it possible to experience the city’s truth from within while observing it from outside, as if the form and meaning of this geography merge. Like a threshold where one can pause and observe—just after destruction, just before another shell takes shape. Like standing on the shore, watching what the waves bring in. The sea washes away whatever is not of its current and delivers it to the shore, and the shore is the memory of the sea, holding all its garbage and animal fossils in a discordant combination, side by side. The seeker of realms longs to capture the spirit of places. They belong simultaneously to all homes and to none of them.

Among the ruins, they recognize the fragments of their imagined house and claim them. From every place and every language, they choose a word, a letter. They construct a borrowed body, a home that both praises and grimaces at the very concept of home, a living body, each of its parts having traveled from a lifeless shell.

Each time the hunter of home is expelled from its former ground, the concept of home manifests in another body—another shell.

They separate from every home. They let go and are let go. They settle in-between, between being the narrator and being the narrative, between watching and being watched, between reality and its double

Credits:

Concept, Direction & Voice: Mahsa Aleph

Cinematography & Editing: Pooyan Ranjbar

Sound Composition: Pouria Raeisi

Production: Mahsa Aleph

Found embroidered textile panel, date unknown, integrated in 2023. 39 × 50 cm. Translation: “I yearn for your love, mother.”