Ghostly Listening: Between Currents
NoR Residency, Volkstuin, Rotterdam - 2026
Sounding Distance investigates how distance can become a tool for coexistence and witnessing. It extends from Ghostly Listening: Between Currents, which connects two distant, entangled rivers: the Maas and the Karun, in Iran.
At the Nature of Rotterdam residency, I began looking for visual translations of the project. The NoR garden became a research space, a place to find sounds unheard through contact mics, merged with sounds far from me, shared by companions from Iran living in spaces similar to the garden. Reconnecting with them after a long-distance experience of the recent war, I reconnected both with my own listening, and with theirs.
Working with satellite images, drawing, and ceramic, the drawings and clay works follow a repetitive method: recording, drawing while listening to that recording, then recording the act of drawing itself, and drawing again from that, finding what gets lost, and what also becomes and appears through these repetitions.
I listened to frogs and crickets I didn't know existed. Reaching into the pond, we heard sharp, glittering, low, and frequent sounds, close to an electrical frequency, joining with the louder calls of the frogs. Mixed and layered, these unseen sounds let me imagine that hearing the garden sounds my father sends me, and his voice while I draw, is really him just outside the door, telling the shepherd's son not to let the dog in, so the chicks stay safe. Or the sound of my friend and colleague Maryam, walking her dog in a circle, sharing with me what her surroundings are like now.
And so the sounds of myself listening to a multilayered sonic past and present are recorded again and again, while I listen to these collages of space and time joined together in my studio, and think: how is my time passing? How does time change its meaning when political stigma and propaganda use the pathways of straits and waters to freeze time, to hold hostage the lives of our loved ones?
Image credits:
Xiao Yu
Raccoons Studio (Tianyi and Te)