Are memories as vivid as you imagine them to be?

Mahsa Naraghi
Land
Chalk on public property
Performance
2023

Land is a performance in which the artist attempts to remember – as precisely as she can – something from the past that does not exist anymore. Something as nostalgic as her grandmother’s house in which she formed her childhood memories. Memories that seem clear but are blurred when it comes to remembering the physical space that she experienced for the last time more than 12 years ago.

The house or has been demolished in 2022 and its original architectural plans do not exist anymore. The artist’s memories and feelings of that place are still vivid.

By using a piece of chalk – the same material that she used so many times to play Hopscotch in her grandmother’s backyard – the artist attempts to remember the house through the rooms’ positions and measurements, the garden, and the yard. This time performing it on public property.

The ephemeral and temporary lines of chalk drawn on the public ground become a clue through which a personal experience of something missing reconnects to a collective memory to exist once again and become something else.