Performance, kitchen curtain of my late grandmother dyed in avocado skin, trimmed branches of the pomegranate tree from Saveh, Iran, 12 minutes, 2024

Video excerpt I
Video excerpt II

Performed on the 7th anniversary of having moved to France:

When I was 16, I decided to leave my native country. 6 months later, shortly after I had turned 17, I moved to the US with my sister. I was naive but felt certain and iron-willed like other young women of my generation who left the country on their own post-revolution. And from 18 years ago when I left Iran until today, my relationship to this way of life, to this uprootedness, to this “making a home and making a home and making a home over and over again,” in all these places where life has brought me, has evolved from cycles of euphoria, confusion, fear, loneliness, love, depression and gratefulness to its latest evolution today that is grief. And it has been so true to me to grieve for a loss that after years, I have come to realise:

I feel that I have been feeling
my female ancestors who fought,
live through my body
and the bodies of my fighting sisters today

that even if their lives were robbed
yesterday
of being free
like the birds of paradise
their souls must be in peace
today

because we have never been any closer
any wiser
any fiercer
any righter
to walk on a path
so together

—

For Françoise

The stranger on the street
is in love with my pomegranate tree
she knows it’s from where I come from
but I’ve never been to Saveh myself
and she loves the poetics of its mystical fruits
with the memories of her French father,
that when she was a child,
how he peeled it with care
and pearled it in front of her curious eyes
that shine bright to this day
against her short grey hair
in her beautiful long red dress

the stranger on the street
does not know how
she no longer is
a stranger to me