Memory Stone is a new commission at The Lowry mainly consisting of a film, showing in a dark, cinema style format, and an installation room beside offering a space of reflection, containing objects and projected images from the film itself. Exploring dreams and displacement within the context of the British countryside, the performative video work, scored by composer Babak Mirsalari, offers an alternative version of the Northern landscape. Nikta Mohammadi combines elements of Iranian and Calderdale mythology – where the artist is from and now lives respectively – to explore both a psychological and physiological relationship with land and place.
Part 1: To Mourn
‘When you move it’s almost like a death. You end this life and start another one.’
A procession slowly marches, carrying a black tent structure across what is hauntingly recognisable as the moors of the north, vast and eerie. It is dusk, dark but for two small orange lights far, far in the distance.
This first scene of Memory Stone, reminiscent in all aspects of a funeral procession, opens the film with a melancholia that’s hard to shake off. By evoking death at the very start, the work is immediately relatable within a context of migration. Where death may traditionally, and especially in a western cannon, signify a culmination of events, the closure of storylines, or the ending of a tragedy (think Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, or The Great Gatsby to name a few) for those of us with experience of migration – whether in our lifetimes or times which precede us – the concept of death is also wrapped up in beginnings. In Morocco, for example, where my own family come from, those who cross the Strait of Gibraltar to enter Europe are known as harraga,which means burned. It’s thought that to migrate to a new life you must burn your old one. Literally, in terms of identity documents and such, but also metaphorically, with regards to your actual identity and all the factors which make you you; your language, your home, your old friends and acquaintances. Though not always termed so harshly, it is a common and recurring idea in both popular culture and academia. Chicana feminist scholar and thinker Gloria Anzaldúa, for example, explores the psychological and emotional impact of crossing physical and cultural borders as a kind of death in her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Similar to the concept of harraga, she describes the loss of familiar surroundings, relationships, and identities whilst simultaneously forging new connections and identities in the new environment, as a form of death and rebirth. The phenomenon is not reserved only for the crossing of nation states however; Nikta herself described the dislocation as just as strong, if not more so, when moving from London to the dramatic rural landscape of Calderdale as it was when she moved from Tehran to the UK.
Heavily influenced by Iranian mythologies and traditions, the tent, which was designed by artist Omid Asadi, is actually a symbol of mourning itself, not just its colour and motion: similar tents can be seen erected each year in the streets and squares of cities like Tehran during Ashura, a religious and cultural event commemorating the martyrdom of Husayn ibn Ali. Mimicking the makeshift shelters Husayn and his followers congregated under before the battle from which the festival takes its name, and in which he lost his life, these tents serve as a space to meet, perform scenes from the story and express grief together. The structure also features further in the film as well as in the installation, which is displayed in a room adjacent, reinforcing its symbolic importance to the overall work through its size, gravity and touch of sadness. By drawing on symbolic shapes and structures, the work is able to elicit the idea of death, particularly within migration, whilst avoiding classic migration tropes or stereotypes (like the ships or suitcases that are overused in visual culture), which I greatly appreciate.
An emblem of communal mourning, the tent casts a shadowy foreboding across the rest of the film, where we follow the story of the film’s main character, a man we see enter the screen as he rambles across the moors, something of a wanderer, as he is tormented by the spirits of his own memories.
Part 2: To Remember
‘Memories and dreams… from before… they find flesh and body in the landscape.’
Standing in a small opening between boulders, the wanderer chases a red thread behind a rock. The scene changes to show a woman sitting above, atop the boulder, manipulating the threads from her wrists. She winds the thread, further and further over the grass, between the rocks, always just out of reach of his hands.
In the stories and myths which influenced this work, death is not the end – mourning and remembering is integral to the present. Nowruz, for example, the new year festival on which the show opened, is a cultural and religious holiday which falls on the spring equinox. Observed mostly in South West and Central Asia, as well as in diasporic communities around the world, it symbolises the renewal of nature and the triumph of light over darkness. Intertwining death and rebirth, families in or from Iran often visit the graves of deceased loved ones to pay respects and offer prayers. These acts of remembrance serve as a reminder of the cyclical nature of life and symbolise the importance of honouring the past while embracing the future. The past two Nowruz have been particularly pertinent in Iran, mourning the loss of the hundreds killed since the ‘Zan, Zendegi, Azadi’ – Women Life Freedom – protests of 2022, whilst also celebrating with a heavy heart, but fiery determination, the possibility of the future they were fighting for. Nowruz honours and mourns the death implicit in the promise of new beginnings. But with the separations enacted in migration, this practice can be hard to maintain. Both literally, in terms of not being able to keep up traditions such as Nowruz or the visiting of cemeteries in a country you are displaced from, but also in the psychological separation from, or death of, the past life which can occur.
In the film, seemingly repressed or forgotten memories come alive in the landscape of Calderdale in three forms: a voiceover, who speaks to the wanderer like an omnipresent being; mystical dream-like female characters who lead and toy with him; and archival footage which breaks violently onto the screen, as well as being played on loop in the installation. Both the voice over and female characters conjure this feeling by taking on an unclear yet recognizable role. They remind me of an old lover, who stirs feelings of desire and anxiety, engendering an impulse, and also an aversion, to get closer to them. An old family member that you approach with tenderness but also hesitancy, as you know they will scold you for not calling or visiting sooner. An old playmate you enjoyed, but who also tormented you. The duality presented in the notions of longing and apprehension is delicate and emotive, drawing specifically on the conflicted relationship between memory and history present in so many migration stories, whilst also instantly relatable for anyone with a past.
The archival footage shows scenes of pre-revolution Iran, found on the old camcorder of composer Babak Mirsalari’s father. By making public footage that would otherwise be locked away in a private family archive, the work reawakens a visceral experience of something intimate yet unfamiliar: a place far away and a time predating the birth of the wanderer, who is visibly too young to have lived in pre-revolution Iran himself. Time passes everywhere, but the colonial hangovers of revolutions, uprisings, wars, and climate injustices – the very reasons why someone might move – are often also responsible for the destruction of the place held in memory. Whether passed consciously through stories, or collections of dusty old photos, or rolls of film, or unconsciously through blood and dreams, that place may no longer be in existence in the real world. By using archival footage in Memory Stone, the landscape becomes a place to hold, and maybe even redress notions of lost homeland and breakages that have occurred across time and space. It creates something akin to postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ – a hybrid cultural space where new identities and meanings emerge through interaction and negotiation. For Bhabha, it was important that these interactions happened between dominant and marginalised cultures. Memory Stone, however, the third space is constructed through the interaction of a marginalised culture – its memories, histories and motifs – with the land, yet still achieves what Bhabha describes as a disruption of binary oppositions and fixed notions of identity.
Seeming to always emerge from the landscape, the voice over, the characters and to some extent the archival footage become synonymous with it, so that rather than being solely a passive backdrop for human stories, the landscape becomes a character itself. We see the desert landscape taking on a role of huge significance within SWANA folklore. In the unanimously loved epic of Majoun and Layla, for example, Majoun wanders in solitude through the vast and arid landscape, which mirrors the characters’ inner turmoil, the intensity of his lost love and found spirituality. Once again in Siavash, an epic Persian myth, the harsh environment of the desert reflects the main character’s unrest after he faces banishment from his home. It is in the desert that he finds transformation and spiritual growth, a common trope in mystical literature, to overcome the injustices inflicted on him and return a hero. These are just two examples of many in which the desert itself, not unlike the hills of Memory Stone, confront a lone male with his innermost fears, desires and attachments. Within mystic tradition this is a psychological battle that if overcome, leads to transcendence and the divine. It is satisfying to see such literary tropes reproduced here, as I often felt the northern moorlands I grew up with summoned similar feelings of the sublime, of deities or the supernatural, as the deserts of these tales. And, where Calderdale is concerned, I am not the only one – it has been a popular site for UFO enthusiasts since the 1980s.
Though the landscape and its personifications can make encountering memory uncomfortable, it is something which the protagonist must overcome. Memory Stone is a playful yet zealous journey of self-discovery. While the wanderer himself might not find transcendence so to speak, the film definitely highlights the importance of healing and rectifying one’s own identity, and how these things can catch up with you if not. As with the Iranian traditions the exhibition so tactfully draws from, like Nowruz, Ashura and even the tale of Siavash, rebirth is prominent, and it is in mourning and remembering that new life is possible.
All quotes are from Nikta Mohammadi, from a phone call on 26th March 2024.
Nikta Mohammadi: Memory Stone, The Lowry, 23 March – 5 May 2024.
Jessica El Mal is a British-Moroccan writer, curator and artist. She is the curator at the Arab British Centre, founder of A.MAL Projects and a current PhD candidate at University of Leeds.
This text is supported by The Lowry.
Published 12.04.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Explorations
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