But how could you live and have no story to tell?
Dostoevsky – Bright nights
If you ask me, everything is a story. Without a story, it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, none of us will exist. From the creation of the Human in myths to our little bitter or sweet memories, they have all been made with one story and have survived by telling and hearing that story over and over again. The immortality of Mona Lisa, Mozart Requiem, The Old Man and the Sea, or the Scream of Munch, are by their stories. Is it possible to imagine that without a story whose it’s ups and downs take our breaths away, we can get so close to something or someone, that we can claim we know it? The stories bring us closer to a human being that lives hundreds of miles away, in another city or country. Hearing and telling our stories, being in each other’s flow of life, and living in, just Gilles Deleuze said, “inside things” brings us closer together. Is separation anything other that someone does not tell you their stories anymore?
“Us: One Station in 14BK” collection is a story from the finale of an old story for me; on a journey that began with the suicide of a friend, who like Deleuze with jumping out of a window, wanted to does not tell her story to us anymore. The turning point in this story was the bloody suppression of the November 2019 demonstrations, and our fear and unaware of the home, due to the shutting down of the Internet in Iran, and the end of this journey, was the end of a friendship when I no longer wanted to hear a story from a former beloved. Each story has a beginning and an end, and we look like the station that others, like buses, stand and pass, and we waiting for the next story.
This collection was supposed to be installed in the form of a poster on our favorite bus line in Istanbul this spring, when we would come back from Tehran, with Linocut hand-printed of Neda Nadjafi from “Istanbul: Memories and the City” quotes by Orhan Pamuk, but it’s not happened because of Quarantine and closed border. I published some of those photos on my Instagram page with hope for hearing new stories, for myself and you.
Amien Shahmoradi
