Zendegi

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

With 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, out of fear, I took refuge in fear itself.

Little by little, I began to collect the bones I saw.

I would take the bones home, and while I was simultaneously terrified and curious and eager, I would wash and clean them in a ritualistic way.

This process of cleaning the bones washed away my final fears. I was no longer afraid of the bones; rather, 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 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 symbols of creation. Symbols of the birth of a new work of art on the white heart of the paper🙂