Alchemy of Disappearance II

2024

A collaboration between Sarah Ahmad and Kaveh Bassiri

Artwork by Sarah Ahmad
Text based art in the installation by Kaveh Bassiri
Poetry reading by Kaveh Bassiri

Alchemy of Disappearance was a spontaneous, ephemeral installation. It sought to activate a gathering around storytelling. A part of Ahmad’s international Unearthing Stories From The Core project, it examines racialized land displacement in marginalized regions in the US and Northern Pakistan. Unearthing… reveals both geographic majesty and immense trauma absorbed by land and its inhabitants. The land(scape) is a repository concealing and preserving our history. Gilgit-Baltistan is home to the longest glaciers outside polar regions, and Pakistan’s most ethnically diverse region. It suffers some of the greatest global damage from climate disaster, contributing to deteriorating mental health among indigenous and displaced populations.

Alchemy of Disappearance insists on a visceral understanding of ‘local’ environmental catastrophe as part of larger patterns, putting them into the dialog as a call for policy change. It continually asks: how might we relate to land outside colonial, capitalist modes of living? A future of belonging, outside territorial possession or extraction. Living in mutual care.

Alchemy of Disappearance fuses gold leaf, collaged images of glaciers in Gilgit, and other elements of the land itself. Here, Ahmad uses tourmaline—a crystalline mineral found in Pakistan—as a proxy for the grounding quality of Gilgit. The gold—a traditional quest for alchemists—considers the process of making the ordinary sacred. Landscapes are enshrined. “Disappearance” here is multivalent, as is the case with much of Ahmad’s work, embracing the rich variety of meanings brought by her audience. Most poignantly, the disappearance of ecological systems and the lifeways they support, with the creeping, insidious forces of climate disaster. In turn engendering a disappearance of women’s labor, especially within the most economically impoverished regions in the world.

As a larger project, Unearthing Stories From The Core considers our enmeshment with the earth, asking: how are we altered by the environment we have altered? For Ahmad, as an immigrant, community and belonging are not static, but a process of continually engaging. Connection with the earth. With the energy and rhythms of creation—our place in the cosmos as part of greater consciousness. An unceasing process of healing from displacement, both internal and physical. Of reuniting fragmented parts of oneself. 

The installation is the first iteration of a collaboration with poet and translator Kaveh Bassiri, who has incorporated text, in various forms, engaging similar themes. For Bassiri, writing and translating are two hands to build bridges across cultures, exploring common personal, socio-political, and spiritual concerns. Bassiri is especially interested in roots: family roots, the roots or etymologies of words, and the experience of putting down roots or being uprooted. His poetry bears witness to the challenges his family experienced as first-generation immigrants in America. He writes of the complexities of identity, the histories embedded in language, and the experiences of belonging and displacement. His own work has been enriched by his role as a translator of modern Iranian poetry and his scholarly explorations of Iranian literature, film, and theater.

Made with support of Kimia Tabib, Marium Rana, James Ratterree, Liz Dueck

Installation photo credits: Melissa Lukenbaugh

Acts of Disappearance & Alchemy of Disappeance I

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