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. In that scorching heat, I would walk on its yellow, barren soil. Here, nature is indifferent and base, filled with depression and hollowness. In this void, I would see the rotten bones of dead animals, which, like definitive signs of "nothingness," had emerged from the heart of the earth. At first, this unmasked encounter stirred 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 exist.

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

I didn't even want to look at the bones. Eventually, I took 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 carefully laid them all out on the old wooden table. I would watch them for long minutes, and then I picked up a rapidograph pen and white cardboard and began drawing the largest skull I had found in the heart of the earth. Every hatch 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 symbols of creation. Symbols of the birth of a new work of art on the white heart of the paper🙂