"Moqarnas and Disoriented Spatial Memories" aims to define a visualization method that contains a performance-installation using a Siah Chador created by a Moqarnas pattern. It intends to visualize an imaginary space grounded on spatial theories and explores a relationship between space, memory, identity, and social relations.
The piece examines a performance-installation to express notions about displacement and memory's impacts on identity and social relation through an art and architecture lens and a research-creation process. I am in the process of creating an abstract black veil using a Moqarnas pattern representing my spatial memories, pains, and struggles attached to those, which travel with me everywhere I go. My goal is to make the black veil transformable into a black tent through a performance. The work examines spatial theories to question how the way we experience and remember various spaces, based on our orientation, could affect our perception of self-identity and social relations.
As an immigrant woman, through an autobiographical process, in the context of revolution, war, suppression of political and social activists, religious minorities, and women, the research addresses how we could move back and forth between the material and the mental world to create an imaginary world in which we can reconfigure our situation in society.
Through a computational and a mathematical process, I will draw, cut, and fuse Moqarnas patterns on a mesh to represent my effort of building a place that can be my home as an immigrant. While Moqarnas fragments depict my broken voice as an Iranian woman, putting them together on mesh could resemble the process of creating shelter by nomadic women of Lorestan, my ancestors. By bringing attention to the forms, colors, orientation, and lighting, the piece questions how the poetics and politics of orientation and displacement might intersect with perception, identity, and social relations.
