What remains of us

Artist’s statement:

For almost fourteen years now, the question of integration has been one of the subjects that has often challenged me. To be able to integrate, it seems to me that one has to take cuttings from one’s roots but also that the ground in which one is going to plant them is fertile. These are necessary conditions to take root elsewhere again in the hope that these cuttings will develop into solid trees. 

In a multidisciplinary approach, I have often asked myself, how do we get there? To be part of another life? Of another society? To change community? To find a new one? What do you leave behind? 

What do you lose? How does one live with the essential aspects of life?  

To leave, to stay, home, absence, family, refuge, parents, friendship, rupture, root, homeland, loss, language, smell, integration, distance, memory, solitude, object, to speak, relationship, to listen, to understand, to taste, to hear, to travel, to be born, to stay, to die, etc.  

What do the words mean? What are their stories? Their experiences?   

What is the experience and the feeling of each person in relation to these words? How could a human being live without his roots? Would there be anything left of us without our roots?  

Leaving, arriving, saying goodbye and hoping have been part of my life for over thirteen years. In the installation I present to you, I seek to highlight the missing parts of the life of each person who has one day decided or been forced to decide to leave their home, to start over somewhere else from scratch.   

Fabric is the material with which the human body has the most contact, hence the choice of this material as the essential element of this installation which will be accompanied by eight works made with a mixed technique (embroidery, writing and linocut on a cotton thread paper), hung on the wall. 

Through this installation, I wish to share with the public the search and the approach of each individual in his personal trajectory in order to make a place for himself in a place, in a city, in a country that were not his own at the beginning.

Writing, words and their meanings remain the heart of this creation. Strips of fabric on which I have hand-embroidered words in French and Persian (my native language) are suspended from the ceiling with nylon threads (invisible). The whole constitutes a large circle suspended between the floor and the ceiling. In the future, this installation could usefully take on an even larger space by expanding beyond the circle to occupy the entire room in which it is located. This would allow the audience to become fully involved in the work, and therefore an integral part of it. Among the embroidered fabric strips, there are suspended plates of plexiglass which are as many mirrors. On these plates are inscribed extracts of texts and poems in French as well as in Persian. 

A soundtrack also accompanies the installation.

Eight works on the walls, an installation in the middle of the room that refer to the quest of each individual.