Zendegi

Lar, the city where I live, is a full-scale painting of a world full of despair and emptiness: waterless, grassless, ruthless, and hopeless. I walked on its yellow and barren soil in that scorching heat. Here, nature, indifferent and lowly, is full of depression and void. In this vacuum, I would see the rotted bones of dead animals which, like definitive signs of "nothingness," had emerged from the heart of the earth. At first, this naked encounter triggered anxiety in me. The bones, bleached white under the hot sun of Lar, were a message to me about my own inevitable fate: to cease to exist.

In each encounter, my being was filled with horror and my heart rate would rise.

I didn't even like to look at the bones. Eventually, I took refuge in fear from fear itself.

Little by little, I started collecting the bones I saw.

I would take the bones home, and while simultaneously feeling both afraid and curious and eager, I would wash and clean them in a ritualistic manner.

This process of cleaning the bones washed away my final fears. I was no longer afraid of the bones; instead, I loved them. Now, they had become a part of my life's journey.

I took the bones to the studio and carefully laid them all out on an old wooden table. I watched them for long minutes, then I picked up a rapidograph pen and a white cardboard and began drawing the largest skull I had found in the heart of the earth. Each hatch on the surface of the cardboard calmed my heart more and filled my being with peace.

From then on, the bones are no longer symbols of death and nothingness to me, but rather symbols of creation. Symbols of the birth of a new work of art on the white heart of the paper🙂