Tehran reveries, Berlin repetitions
a projects by Lise Chevalier & Nazgol Ansarinia
Aug - Sep 2007
Tehran reveries: Everyday social experience in Tehran like any other social context is the result of the actions and interactions of its inhabitants with their environment, and determined by the socio-political relations of the larger system they belong to. Considering that every small interaction in a city is based upon the same logic as that of the larger system, coming across situations in Tehran which can only be called absurd in order to be comprehended, one should conclude that although inconceivable they too are the products of the same system and follow the same logic.
It is precisely these situations that we took as the focus of our project; making an attempt at understudying them as a way of understating something about the workings of the system they belong to and in return about the contemporary social experience at large.
These absurdities are not a separate or outstanding part of the everyday but in fact they are integrated to such degree with everything else going around them, that they often go unnoticed. What distinguishes them is their momentarily clash with that which seems to be the common sense. To find sense behind that which its quality is lack of sense or logic, we decided to draw parallels between the real experiences/situations and what seemed to be the closest to them: dreams. In dreams images, sounds, environments, actions and interactions are produced and juxtaposed together in a way which appears to be illogical, producing absurdities that are accepted for what they are. We found these absurdities comparable to what we saw or heard about in real. While dreams are the symptoms of the internal senses of body, we believed that these absurdities as a social products must reveal something about the inner-workings of the system .By going back and forth between the real and the dreamed, we search for ways of exploring further this fascinating aspect of city.
Our way of working wasn't to find an explanation behind what seemed to be absurd but instead it was about understanding it though observing, participating, re-enacting and later on creating these situations ourselves. We based our visual experimentation on three methods: documenting situations we came across in the city, situations we re-enacted based on real events and situations we re-enacted based dreams.
Tehran reveries is still in progress, as we continue to experiment with the form and explore ways of building up visual and textual connections.
Berlin repetitions: The focus of the project in Berlin remains the same on the subjects of absurdity and social experience. This time however, we did not look for absurdity in disorder but it was in extreme order that we were interested to find absurdity. Our method of working changed to adapt to the new context by following schematically the systems that are an integrated and often hidden parts of the everyday. One of our observations was focused on a BVG worker announcing the destination of trains (S Bahn) by going back and forth between two speaker on each side of the platform. The BVG worker as an element of a system is plausible to fail due to repetition. While the platform is a passage the repetitive movements of the worker disturbs and is disturbed by the flow. What revealed itself was a kind of dull extremity in the functioning of the system that seemed to be at odds with the intention of the system itself.
Tehran reveries, Berlin repetitions continue to develop individually but simultaneously effecting and interacting with each other.