Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Batool Elhennawy, Ryan Ferko, Batoul Ibrahim, Bayan Kiwan, Mahshid Rafiei, Kari Leigh Rosenfeld, Mounir Soussan, Francisco Rodríguez Teare, Merve Ünsal
Collaborative workshop (2019) & online residency (2020)
Arriving Elsewhere is an ongoing collaboration between Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Batool Elhennawy, Ryan Ferko, Batoul Ibrahim, Bayan Kiwan, Mahshid Rafiei, Kari Leigh Rosenfeld, Mounir Soussan, Francisco Rodríguez Teare, Merve Ünsal.
The project began in April 2019 as a 10-day collective workshop hosted by Spring Sessions in Wadi Rum, Jordan. Within a desert area that is often used as an ambiguous backdrop for a range of science-fiction, historical, and political films, we came together with a group of ten artists, writers, and filmmakers to consider how we observe and narrate landscapes. Beginning with the premise that a desert is not a blank space or nowhere, we collectively sought to address the political and historical complexity of the location through our direct experience and distinct subjectivities.
In the summer of 2020, the project was invited by Mercer Union through their collaborative research commission called Isthmus, to continue exploring the overlap of individual and collective experience, this time in an online form dispersed across a multitude of locations and timezones.
What began as an experiment in collective experience, evolved over time into a constellation of works, texts, and videos. Ongoing and open in form, fragments of this work and process appears here.
Documentation of a live online performance, presented by Mercer Union on November 15, 2020 can be seen here.
– parastoo.faraz.ryan@gmail.com –
Parastoo Anoushahpour, Faraz Anoushahpour, Ryan Ferko