Action 5: Video Sketch 2
1
This video started as an internal quarrel with myself. Looking back at my actions, they did not reflect my main concerns. Because I cannot talk about them from my current geographic location. Well, technically I can, but that’s a risk I’m not willing to take. Freedom of speech is a luxury I can’t afford. But how can I practice design when I have to keep censoring myself?
The plaster sculpture was an assignment for one of my undergraduate classes. That is my own face. I am willingly censoring myself. In front of the camera, I can show you around, we can talk about nature, the urban environment, read books, eat and drink. But in the end, my real voice can’t be heard.
2
Although I had a general vision, I didn’t plan the scenes for this video. I thought as I was recording and I recorded as I was thinking. The embroidery was something I really wanted to incorporate in the video, but I didn’t know how. As I was holding the needle and thread, and as I stitched the first line, a random thought popped into my head. #Thoughts&Prayers, a popular term that people use on their social media in response to a tragedy. It is so easy to send a tweet out in the world and move on with your life while feeling like you’ve fulfilled your public duty. I decided to stitch that hashtag. It took me a while but I liked how it became even more meaningless to spend more time generating this shallow message and not even putting time to beautify it.
3
After stitching, things got even more ridiculous, in a good way though. I thought about mass media and its lucrative business based on providing news with certain propaganda in mind. It has been normalized by the media to report on the death toll in the middle east every day. What do we do? #Thoughts&Prayers Done. Problem solved. To be honest, sometimes even posting a hashtag is not that necessary. That’s normal in the middle east right? These folks just love conflict. We are numb to chaos in certain places and sensitive toward others. The numbness reaches the victims too, for the sake of survival. But when the media decides to share the stories, our stories, they follow their own narratives. The real voices are marginalized still.
What if someone is given a platform, can they talk now? Tell the truth? Well, in theory, yes. But only around certain topics. It can’t get political, societal, and feminism is out of the question. Anything that attracts controversy and unneeded attention has been banned and a partial truth makes its way to the media.
As a young Iranian and also as a woman in a misogynist society, I’ve witnessed /////////// on unimaginable and unspeakable levels. I wanted you to know that I can’t share /////////// with you and even this blog post has gone through many filters.