Out of Place
Samaneh Mohseni is an artist, writer, researcher, and architect working between Stockholm and the no-man's-land of the Iranian diaspora. Her work is concerned with the states of in-betweenness and how it manifests when brought into a temporal narrative context from the void of abstraction.
Her work situates itself in the constant movement between looking in and out of oneself resulting in the inevitable wonderings around concepts of time, place, memory, language, and politicized human and non-human bodies. Her practice includes text, sound installations, film, and fiction writing.
She holds a post-master degree in public art from Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, an MA in Visual Culture from Lund University, Sweden, and an MA in Architectural Studies from Tehran, Iran.
Her work has been presented in Malmö Konstmuseet, Prospekt Gallery, Copenhagen, Copenhagen Architecture Festival, Landskrona Foto, Lund University, TU Berlin.
Farshid Nasrabadi is an architect and photographer based in Stockholm, Sweden.
His work is positioned at the intersection of architecture, photography, and space with their socio-political context. The focal point of his practice is weaving society and the public together through experimenting with technical aspects of photography as the departure point to dig into deeper existential concepts and ways of seeing. It stems from his architecture education and the contrast between his lived experiences in Iran and Sweden. He has worked on collaborative artistic projects within photography, film, and sound and their interplay.
His work has been presented in Malmö Konstmuseet, Prospekt Gallery, Copenhagen, Copenhagen Architecture Festival, Venice Biennale, and TU Berlin.
I’m on the metro for at least an hour a day, it takes me places. It’s also my alone time, I can go places in my head. These two sometimes merge and overlap, I get lost in and out of my head, in and out of a vessel, in and out of a platform, here and not here. I get absorbed into the person sitting in front of me, or next to me, or the one standing by the door, the one getting on or the one getting off, I become them, and they might become me. My words and theirs seep into one another, floating in all the other words.
I ride with them all, when the borders of literal and metaphorical get blurred, when a state of mind and a state of place diverge and merge.
Excerpt from the prototype 'Riding with POCs,' 2024.
Our proposal starts from where we are and have been for the past 4 years, migrants in Sweden. This specific position resulted in a question of how affective encounters and not affective ones shape the relationships between humans and between humans and non-humans. Through delving deeper into this question we are now proposing Out of Place. A rig that hosts a constellation of material and immaterial concepts and topics. These topics all start from a place of willingness to shift one’s position, to become out of place, embrace it, and return to it.
We’ll develop public installations, visual encounters, and readings that address the overall concept of being out of place, the weirdness of it, and the uncertainty of it. And at the same time, we allow the rig to shift and change shape through collaborations, encounters and stories, that are willing to be out of place but at the same time are seeking a place. The inherent ambiguity and flexibility of the rig allow us and anyone who comes to be out of place to be able to bring in discussions of empathy, affect, exclusion, environmental anxiety and social sustainability. The rig is out of place, but is a place to mind the gaps and bridge them.