Zendegi

Lar, the city where I live, is a panoramic tableau of a world full of despair and emptiness: waterless, grassless, cruel, and hopeless. I used to walk on its yellow, barren soil in that scorching heat. Here, nature is indifferent and base, full of depression and emptiness. In this void, I would see the rotted bones of dead animals, which had emerged from the heart of the earth like definitive signs of "nothingness." At first, this blatant encounter would evoke anxiety within me. The bones, bleached white under the hot sun of Lar, were a message to me about my own inevitable fate: to cease to be.

With every encounter, my being would be filled with terror, and my heart rate would rise.

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

Little by little, I began to collect 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 arranged them all carefully on an old wooden table. I would watch them for long minutes, and then I picked up a rapidograph pen and a piece of white cardboard and began to draw the largest skull I had found in the earth. Every hatch mark on the surface of the cardboard calmed my heart 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🙂