Projection mapping animations and sound by Diana Torres
In the 13th century, Caesareius of Heisterbach, the Cistercian monk and amateur ornithologist, was said to have once tied a note bearing the question “Oh Swallow, where do you live in winter?” to the leg of one of the many swallows with whom he shared a roost in the abbey just before the swallow’s annual winter migration. Upon the swallow’s return in spring, an answer to his question was tied to the same bird’s leg reading: “In Asia, in the House of Peter.”
The ephemerality of place, and the journey towards a home that is situated between the natural and domestic have long since fascinated Gholizadeh, who holds an MA in architecture from Iran University of Science and Technology. Gholizadeh, who uses her work as a means to probe at the essentials of architecture and the precarious balances and trade-offs we make between that which nature has provided us with and that which we have given ourselves. Having incorporated techniques such as model making, projection mapping, painting and weaving into her work, Gholizadeh explores the ways in which the idea of “home” is as apophenic as a cloud moving over territories – fragile, inconsistent, and always something perspectival. For this exhibition, Gholizadeh will be showing a new series of tapestries and a collaborative projection mapping with Diana Torres. The tension between craft, technology, and their assertion to the status of art is heightened further by their placement within Apparatus’s domestic setting. The anachronism of weaving and the technological advancements that brought advanced projection techniques into fruition are not as oppositional as one might expect. The warp and weft of a weaving represent the original 1 and 0 data set that projections run on, showing how computation originally developed in the home. Much like the swallow took flight for other parts of the world, it inevitably returns back to its starting point. Ultimately the correspondence purportedly received by Caesareius is of little importance, but rather it is its underlying question that Gholizadeh has grasped on to: how does migration change our meaning of home and how are nature’s rhythms – which we are not as free from as we would like to believe – responsible in some way for us finding and making meaning of a place?