What is Left to Listen to Now?

8-channel sound installation and performance
2025

Performance & Installation, Mourning a revolution, MaMA Rotterdam, NL — 2025, group exhibition curated by Salomé Lopes & Zé Lourenço.
Listening to the whirring, crackling, and igniting within the structures we inhabit reveals the interconnections between moments, tracing relentless attempts and failed promises that haunt us and the ghosts we have become. How do these ghosts move, vibrate, and echo through time and space? Through critical listening, how can we unite echoes of change within ourselves and the structures that shape our existence? This work is a performance and multi-channel sound installation, part of an ongoing process that has evolved through listening to, unlearning from, and recording the everyday remnants of a building in Tehran.

The work consists of a brief yet continuous moment of conversation that transforms into a performance, while the sound installation is composed of discarded pipes that expand into the space, capturing the everyday sounds that the building's structure holds and carries within itself. The performance features two characters who unfold in a dialogue engaged in a continuous discourse on the act of repair. Participants can also embody the roles, whether as a duo or a larger group, allowing for diverse interpretations and resonances.

The project began with a desire to explore the nuances of change through time, material, and thought, how it manifests in the building’s structure and extends to the community it holds within. It constantly circles back to the question of where one stands in the ongoing relationship between expectations, promises, and the failures we encounter while seeking the hauntedness that prevails upon the bodies, whether human or that of the building itself.

Image credits: Gert Jan van Rooij, Emilia Martin, Sohrab Kashani, Igor Ripak