Azade Shahmiri: You and I Have Seen the Garden from That Cold Sullen Crack

Wandering around the invisible or documented, repurposed or erased gardens, You and I Have Seen the Garden from That Cold Sullen Crack reclaims the peripheries, reassembling the ruptured narratives buried beneath vegetation and soil, flowing through dying water channels—qanats.

It maps and tracks the layered agency and performativity of gardens by interweaving visual archives, found footage, and soundscapes with woman-to-woman letters, fragmented biographies, the performer’s ambivalent presence, and a self-reflective voice.Gardens, bound to land and labor, remain contested.

The performance, likewise unfinished and growing, stands as testimony to internal struggles and to Western interventions and orientalist framings embedded within and through them—grounds of grief and loss, and of resilience and hope.