Genius Loci Photography Project
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​"Hell is where the meaning of death has perished: nothing can end the lethal agony and torture leading to death, not even death itself. The soothing alleviation that death brings on wholly dissipates, the misery of the body becomes eternal. Death repeats itself ceaselessly, just as dust comes back no matter how plenty you swab, or as sleep, which will succumb you at night no matter how abundant your slumber was the night before.
At night, the body falls asleep (dies?), the spirit awakens, and takes off to the world of dreams: hovering specters amidst the infernal city. At night, if walking more absentmindedly, one's gaze will find them. They voraciously transmit luminous and sonic signals to the living, although not everyone grasps them.
The specters have not been convinced of death yet. The delusional being feels alive as long as a curious stare revolves upon them, or when clicks of the shutter of a camera interrupt the recurrent silence of the night. After all, the characters of a novel do not come to life unless someone reads the book."  

​The aim was to capture the experience of the metropolis of Tehran through nocturnal landscapes. The absence of intense illuminance tires the domination of the eye over the urban environment. It becomes necessary to survey it with steps rather than gaze, just as a blind person pats a surface to perceive it.

Blackness removes spaces from social and economic circles of urban life, dynamic during the day. It empties them. Black holes are full of void, voids and vacant spaces are occupied by possibilities, of what could have been and what could be: a trace from the past, a hope from the future. Another world stimulating imagination emerges. Ordinary spaces become alien. Half of an object is seen, the other imagined. Silhouettes can be anyone. Ambivalence gets reflected, multiplied. Reflections incite mirages, illusions, hallucinations?

This text is partly inspired by the concept of Terrain Vague as explored by Ignasi de Solà-Morales.