Golgonooza in Isfahan

SITE SPECIFIC INSTALLATION

“Golgonooza in Isfahan” is a multimedia installation using video projection, light, reactive sensors and sound, as well as a physical maquette.

My departure point for this project is a city and the epistemic relationship with it: how it is remembered, how we move through it, and how human agency and subtle, everyday gestures can transform a city's past and future imagination.

“Golgonooza in Isfahan” is a multimedia installation using video projection, light, reactive sensors and sound, as well as a physical maquette.

My departure point for this project is a city and the epistemic relationship with it: how it is remembered, how we move through it, and how human agency and subtle, everyday gestures can transform a city's past and future imagination.

In William Blake's works, Golgonooza is a mythical, imaginary city made up of human bodies overlaying London with a fourfold structure and becoming a space/time location of dreams. I merged the live APIs of Isfahan, where I lived for two years and which was the subject of my previous research, and Berlin, where I currently live. This process allowed me to create a new map, an imaginary city interweaving different layers of time and space. I use city GPS as a testimony to my memory of the spaces.

A city is a condition of spacetime that is continuously produced through perception, movement, and use. This is evident in public spaces, such as streets and squares, where life and structure constantly reshape each other. While researching epistemic cities, I came across a text by Henry Corbin, who argues that cities also have an inner dimension: the Imago-Templi, or the allegorical city. They are not merely geographical locations. Cities constantly adapt and rewrite themselves through power and everyday use. They never have just one identity. This is why a city differs from a house. A city reveals the soul of its time not as unity, but as conflict, fragmentation, and endurance. It is a field of constantly produced possibilities that continuously manifest in lived form.