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q & a

alinah azadeh

What's the impetus, what moves and inspires you to make a film or art installation?

As a British-Iranian woman, my originating, central drive has always been my cultural identity and the questions of home, belonging, and emotional meaning that spring from experiencing life through two very different cultural lenses.

My work draws heavily on the human narratives I uncover as I encounter and work with people in a wide range of social contexts.

In terms of process, ideas and images arrive from nowhere after a period of intensive research on a subject or a particular experience. My debut installation piece, Space within the Real, an installation blurring the boundaries between public and private space, evolved after spending time in the Californian desert. This trip followed a year of MA research into the nature of contemporary sacred space and the sublime.

A long-standing relationship with the Sufi tradition (I use readings from Rumi and Hafiz to inspire my process) and my own spiritual practice (Subud) have also played a primary role in shaping my work. The simplest way to articulate this is to say that I seek to make my experience of the invisible visible through the work I do. I want to create a connection through my work with a source of transformation and a greater sense of relationship with others who walk this extraordinary earth. I realize this is all very ambitious, but I feel that there have been moments when this has occurred for both myself and others, and it's these moments which motivate me to continue on what is often a difficult career path!

The answer to this question would not be complete without mentioning that two recent major life experiences have dramatically affected the form and drive of what I do: the birth of my first child, Delia Shadi, in December 2004, swiftly followed by the death of my Iranian mother in Phuket during the Asian Tsunami. As well as the great sense of loss that this experience brought, came a gift, both that of motherhood and a new sense of the purpose of my work. There came the desire to create more space for human reflection and evaluation of values free from the constraints of the past. Part of this is also the desire to question the western view of death as an "endpoint" and our sense of separation from others who pass on. I want people to see themselves as not alone through my work and life, if only for a second. I want to create a space where intimacy, healing, and creativity are the highest commodity.

How does place inform and affect your work—geographical location, and also interior/exterior spaces?

I think these two areas are linked; having never felt "at home" culturally and, after many years of traveling to locate a home and not succeeding, I finally found it in myself through my spiritual practices. My work has then become a channel to express that, and part of that expression is both the reference to my divided sense of place culturally as well as the use of space as a medium to articulate this very state.

My mother moved to the UK from Iran in 1965, and I in turn, was able to leave the UK at 21 (although for very different reasons) and access an independent urban lifestyle. I did this by moving to Paris, France on my own for seven years. This gave me the opportunity to "recreate" myself free of the pressure to follow a fixed path through educational structures, to bow to social pressures, or to be defined by economic imperatives. It also allowed me to accept and become aware of both of my cultural backgrounds in a culturally neutral environment. I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to value myself and be valued for both being and expressing two very diverse cultures. I always experienced a strong sense of the "other" place (Iran) through my mother, both culturally and also literally through her constant supply of information via the weekly food, literature, and political commentary she supplied us with! Unfortunately, I was not brought up bilingual but I always heard Farsi spoken around me, and it became a kind of musical soundtrack. When I finally went to Iran with her in 1992, I recognized so much of the "picture" I was seeing and yet felt a strange kind of remove. I processed this into an imagined space through my work to create a poetic space for questions that I think is best articulated through my 2003 film 1+1=3.

I first fell in love with the idea of making space-based work in 2001 when I created the site-specific installation, Space within the Real. I used video, multi-channel sound, roses, light, mirrors, text, textiles and scent to transform my private home into a public, poetic space, exploring the boundaries between internal and real space. An example of how I integrated my experience of place into this work was my front room, which looked onto the sea. I emptied out the room, a large and high space, covered the walls with 200 mirrors, and played a multi-channel sound recording through four hidden speakers. This recording was an hour loop of a four-stage journey from my front window to the sea-shore. The mismatch between what people standing in the room saw and what they heard (e.g., the sound of people walking past, but no one visibly there) created a disconcerting sense of past and present place compressed into one experience.

Since then, place has been a theme in one way or another in everything I do—more recently in my 2005 live installation project The Loom: From Text to Textile (www.loomproject.com). This was a live/visual arts project involving the wide-scale human participation in the computer-mediated weaving of a single textile. I used the location coordinates of the death and birthplaces of 300 loved ones of participants from over 20 countries to inform the pattern of a twenty-metre textile woven over four days. The public could access the pattern process both via a website and through a large-scale installation in Brighton, UK. The space became a space for interaction and remembrance and was linked to the simultaneous weaving of the textile at ASF Weave 30 miles away. The weaving process was simultaneously streamed online, thus the project existed in three spaces at once, as well as 300 places. This interweaving of virtual, physical and emotional space is becoming increasingly characteristic of my work, as mass participation becomes a core part of the process.

How does gender factor into your films—yours personally and women in general?

My work naturally tends towards articulating intimate emotional realities that are most often relevant, but not exclusive to the issues that arise from the female experience. I have consistently been invited to work with small groups of women through commissions (Hand to Hand (2004), Mother to Mother (2006)) and feel very at home in this kind of working environment.

I want to use my work to create a situation where women are free to authentically evaluate, express, and communicate their needs and desires without fear of external or self-censorship. My first, self-initiated work which attempted to do this was my short film 1+1=3—I had many questions about the British Iranian female experience which I had had little opportunity to share or ask anyone else in the same cultural position. It is a work made from the answers to these questions that I asked of the eight women who I located whilst researching the film.

Mother-to-Mother is another recent example. It investigates the emotional relationships and legacies of motherhood. Over the first four months of the commission, conversations were held with mothers that focused on their relationship both to their own mothers and their children. These were followed by weaving workshops where participants were invited to express their "mother to mother" relationships creatively and non-verbally. The process raised a whole series of questions around the legacy of our mothers' values and how that impacts our parenting, the most important of which form the basis of an online garden at www.mother-mother.com . Both the conversations held and the weaves created inspired the final artwork, and the garden is still open to any woman to cultivate. Once full, it will be used to create a physical artwork. I invite any woman, mother or not, to reflect on and "plant" her relationship with her mother in this Persian garden. I want those who plant to feel connections with people they may never meet and brush emotional shoulders with them, to know they are not alone in what they feel, they are not separate.

Another example of gender inspiring the idea for an artwork is the research I did for The Loom Project. I had just spent five years working in multimedia and was looking into the origins of programming. I was given "Zeros and Ones" by Sadie Plant to take to Iran with me on my second trip in 1998, which looks at the key role of women in the development of computing by examining its predecessor—weaving, the first programming language. I was so absorbed by this narrative I decided to learn to weave and was shown how to weave kilims while visiting my mother's home village in North Western Iran. Thus began a love affair with the history of weaving and the idea for The Loom Project came when looking at the Jacquard Loom and Babbage Machine in the Science Museum in London.

This project, which I am developing for touring in 2008, celebrates the magical, performative process of weaving—as a carrier of personal narratives—that is a testament to centuries of predominantly female-generated programming and development. It is also a memorial to my own mother, who was a crochet designer and created the most intricate designs without any pattern, a sophisticated programmer in her own right.

How does the narrative you create for your films come about?

1+1=3 (2003) is, as mentioned before, a film based on interviews with women in my cultural position or similar. The narrative was therefore informed by the answers to questions. The questions were often visual and sensory questions, e.g., what does your impression of Iran sound/taste like? If it were a landscape, what would it look like? The answers gave me the prompts for the content of the film, which consisted of hours of footage I had shot back in 1998 in Iran, together with some footage shot in the UK, inspired by images suggested by the women interviewed.

Hand to Hand, a film made in 2004 after a three month residency within the Turkish-Kurdish female community in East London, came again from recorded interviews on female issues and a series of live events staged with the women, such as Henna Night (the night before a wedding, when a women's hands are dyed with henna, amidst a women-only feast and dancing context).

This was the last film I made, (apart from documentation films) as, while working with women since then, I lost the desire to record conversation as I felt it was beginning to compromise my connection to them, to affect how present I was in the process of the work and too fixed on delivering an outcome. Thus film had become part of a more live, space-based kind of work that focuses on participation in a process, and leaves other collaborating practitioners to the creation of the final outcome (a textile, a website.)

Can you talk about the layering of media you use in your films?

The way I use layering in my film work aims to reflect the way we perceive experiences, thinking multiple thoughts and living out simultaneous narratives in our experience of being human. Thinking specifically of 1+1=3, It is also symbolic of the hybrid experience of being in at least two places and or spaces at any one time. I use footage like a paint palette and layer it until it fits what I want to express at a given point in the film. The end sequence of 1+1=3, (featured on the still on this site) is I think the most successful example of this, and for me it expresses the poignancy, pain, and longing the film is trying to communicate.