The Kariz-Workshop of the Lost, Discarded, and Forgotten Things
This Video collection was created as the artist contribution to the digital garden at The Sun Sets Eight Times A Day project.
In this Kariz / workshop, things of different materials, sizes, shapes and functions are supposed to find new forms, work together and make combinations and compositions. Here, too, humans, as always, intervene in the life of non-human but she tries to minimize her agency.
The Kariz-Workshop is consisted of five wells or shafts. The three active wells are the entrance ways to the workshop. Each of these wells has a name and reveals the state and stage of the experience of the objects in this process: Proximity well, Transformation well, and Persistence well.
The Kariz-Workshop is consisted of five wells or shafts. The three active wells are the entrance ways to the workshop. Each of these wells has a name and reveals the state and stage of the experience of the objects in this process: Proximity well, Transformation well, and Persistence well.


Background

Lost, forgotten, and abandoned objects are now part of any garden ecosystem. The garden, this culturalized nature, and the objects, the unnatural inhabitants of the garden, leave their traces on each other and affect each other in their specific way and rhythm.

This dehydrated Kariz (Qanat) imagined in central Iran has become an underground archive and workshop for collecting lost, abandoned, discarded, and forgotten things; human-made non-humans, many of which we have seen many times while hiking in nature. Turning from waste and rubbish into new and spotless objects, broken and outdated things, or unshaped pieces - each of which may have a story.

An important part of this experience was the layer that the garden's artists and spectators added to it; The audio pieces were made by the other artists to reversion and layering the videos and echo their voices in this Kariz/workshop.

Excerpt from the Kariz-workshop’ Logbook:

“Change the instruments and you will change the entire social theory that goes with them.”
Bruno Latour

“Basically, the existence of a garden in relation to the desert is more meaningful. Where nature is generous, with flowers, plants, colors, and water, few people are bound by the garden. The garden, a manufactured nature, is an image that we construct of the desired nature somewhere, in a corner, on a piece of land.”
Shahrokh Meskoob

"the Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of appreciating the beauty that is 'imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete in nature."

The Sun Sets Eight Times A Day
In this virtual project, eight artists from eight time zones share their work and may invite the audience to gently participate, to add their own questions and thoughts if they wish. the artists were active in the garden from July 21-31 2021, uploading new creative responses to their chosen themes and the participants’ personal contributions. The digital garden brings together a potential coexistence in artistic dialogue, interchange, resolutions, debate, and juxtaposition.

Premiere: 21-31 July 2021

  →The Sun Sets Eight Times A Day Website