Bāygān: House of Photographs and Words
Photo
Mehri Rahimzadeh
Untitled from the series The Natural History of Decay
2019-2020

Text

Sara Yektapour

Random Sequence of Vague Events

All across the wasteland fragments are scattered. Tiny shards of glass that have sewn the earth to the sky (and by reflecting the sky onto the ground) have created a connection between the duality of earth and sky; the very desire that the hill in the center of the image also pursues. This hill is not a fist reaching toward the sky but the earth’s yearning to reach the sky; the desire of a fragment among thousands to become the sun. A humble particle that is the result of a great fracture—so immense that it is impossible to imagine the unified existence from which these particles originated. The nature of the entire unit is obscure, and I do not know after which explosion the shards have flowed like this across the earth, nor why previously that artificial object was nestled in this barren land among thorny mounds. But what matters is this random sequence of vague events that has created this drifting island; an island suspended between earth and sky.

I have passed this drifting island
through the ocean’s revolution
and the mountain’s explosion
and the fragmentation was the secret of that unified existence
from whose smallest particles the sun was born*.

*"Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season", Forough Farrokhzad, Beh Afarin Publication, 1998, P 34