Sunburned Land: A bodily experience of a digital story
Located close to the shores of a politically strategic territory and placed in the middle of digital warfare, this island carries aggressive and charged news about drones, tankers, oil, weaponry, rivalry, deceptive claims, and false flag operations. The Sunburned Land is a fictive portrayal of an actual location and its occurring events.In this new work, Nazanin focuses specifically on the ‘physicality’ of the landscape and the effects of the landscape on narrative and the body of the audience. The warmth, colors, and ambiguous topography are the natural elements of its physical presence. Lying down and looking at a holistic picture on a tilted angle engages the body and mind in an experience that brings us closer to feeling the contrasting tranquility of the island. (The tilted surface, at -6° to -24°, stimulates blood circulation to give a neutralising and numb-like feeling while looking at the screen). Together, the flying movement of the camera, the physical weightlessness and numbness, and the storyline, create a bodily experience of a digitally narrated story—questioning our trust in perceptions that are shaped in the absence of bodily experiences. The work engages the audience in a critical exploration of the political reality of the Hormoz Strait, allowing the audience to move between the slippery space between fiction and Non-fiction.
Tetem, Enschede
BodyBuilding. Inefficient
Tool Building for Quantified Beings
Curated by Hackers & Designer
20.02 - 14.06, 2020
The work began when Nazanin was developing a script for a new game environment and travelled to Iran to film and scan the landscapes there. While she was filming, new concerns were raised about the Hormoz Strait and its role in escalating political tensions between Iran and the West. The perception of potential violence was being shaped through the news, in digital media, and tweet wars. However, the ‘physicality’ of the location remained mostly unknown to the audience. Therefore, Nazanin travelled to the politically strategic Qeshm and Hormoz islands and tried to capture the natural landscape by filming and photographing it with a Drone.In order to play with the tension between fiction and reality, Nazanin combines 3d scanning, 3d modeling and real footage to recreate the island. This way of working is the result of prohibitions to freely fly a drone and using laser scanners for aerial documentation in such an intensified area. By simulating the hidden characteristics of this geographical location, she fabricates a journey in a fictional island, aiming to question the absence of physicality and bodily experiences, replaced with digital representations, that shape our perception of realities.
