Mohammad Parvizi – Call Me By Name

[Resilience of the Face]

“When the face is exposed, it becomes vulnerable.” Georgio Agamben

Being exposed means that moment of the face where nothing is hidden behind any word, exposing the wordless face. Agamben brings: “Unveiling the face is unveiling oneself in language.” In this sense, when language steps aside, the face becomes clear. Therefore, the unveiled face is the speechless face itself. For this reason, a face that reveals itself becomes vulnerable and fragile because no words assist it. Nevertheless, it is only in the peak of this vulnerability and fragility that the face becomes apparent. The revelation of the face is its opening, opening to itself and perhaps even stranger to others. It is from this wide-open expanse of the face that we encounter others, and they encounter us. Each encounter, despite all its splendor, is an experience of existential anguish. Agamben reminds us that “the face means bearing the burden of this openness and enduring it.”

Life means experiencing this very open face and its ability to endure its vulnerabilities. The fate of understanding something from life lies in a face that remains open to itself and to others. Otherwise, the face remains closed and descends to the level of mere appearance, or worse, becomes faceless.

“Segments of Weekly Session – Week One: Reza Abedini
Titled: Image – Memory”

“Segments of Weekly Session – Week Two: Mehdi Moghimi-Nejad
Titled: Memory, Remembrance, and Images”

“Segments of Weekly Session – Week Three: Mehdi Moghimi-Nejad
Titled: Abstraction, Memory, and Images”

“Segments of Weekly Session – Week Four: Pouria Jahanshad
Titled: Shared Memory”

“End of Part One”

Call Me by Name: Second Performance

Remembrance

How can we recreate a lost or distorted past through remembrance? This happens when “remembrance” can transcend lived experiences and expel their excess; in a sense, where remembering has the ability to grasp potential possibilities and seize the immanent domains of the past. Here, “remembrance” is not merely recollection, as Lacan has shown, “remembrance” (recollection) differs from recollection. From Lacan’s perspective, remembrance is reconstruction, and therapy through remembrance is the “reconstitution” of the subject’s complete history. This is more about supporting and organizing a fragmented and chaotic identity than merely remembering. Through remembrance, we can organize our shattered identity; and identity is not necessarily our lived self but includes all suppressed and crushed feelings, along with their historical burden. In this realm, remembrance is a form of reconstructing experience, regardless of whether we have lived through it or not. In this process, memory reproduces an excess beyond the lived event itself; Walter Benjamin considers Proust’s work (“In Search of Lost Time”) as the unique example of this, which is not recollection but remembrance.

Proust’s narrator remembers frantically to bring memory into experience, or to achieve the experience of memory. Benjamin states in his essay “The Image of Proust”: “As an experienced event, at least in the end, it lies within the realm of experience. A remembered event is free and unrestricted, as it is merely a key to everything that came before and after it; yet, in another sense, this memory is what expands the difficult necessities of texture and interweaving here. The unity and coherence of the text are solely due to the pure act of remembering…” In Proust’s work, remembering is about transcending the boundaries of memory and reaching a kind of dream; the same image that, according to Benjamin, emerges from Proust’s text; a window into the “new.” This approach, far from being isolated and imaginary, is declared and more supported, carrying a fragile and valuable truth, which is the image. This image is released from the texture of the remembered past. Benjamin writes: “Proust described a life not as it was, but as someone experienced or remembered it.” This means that memory, in its conceptual essence, is more dependent on the essence and form of experience in the event than on the lived event itself; the same truth that (not through recollection) can be extracted from the heart of events through the power of remembrance.

Mohammad Parvizi

“Remembering” is something like the experience of sleepwalking; the body remains motionless like a corpse in sleep, but when we dream, without our body moving, we can walk. Remembering is like walking while being still, but in wakefulness…

Parts of the weekly session – Week Five: Behrang Samadzadegan
Titled: Memory, Image, and History
“Critical Review of the History of Video Art”

Parts of the weekly session – Week Six: Amir Maziyar
Titled: Image, Memory, and Imagination

Parts of the weekly session – Week Seven: Alireza Taghaboni
Titled: Space and Memory
“Around Architecture and Installation”

Parts of the weekly session – Week Eight: Pamela Karimi
Titled: Art, Memory, and the Street

End of Part Two