A critical autoethnographic approach to the current state of urban development.

Photo credits: Gabriela Valdespino

Endless Twist is a guided walk through a 3D space that is constructed by urban fragments and personal memories. It is a multimedia web installation and audiovisual performance presenting the artist’s critical perspective regarding the agency of the human and non-human, and by extension of architects, planners, and owners. While reflecting on the role of architecture as an apparatus that produces power dynamics, Farzad Golghasemi examines the corporeality associated with physical and digital spaces, through a techno-poetical interpretation of the contemporary state of political economy.

Endless Twist installation – HfK Jahresausstellung 2023

Screen capture from endlesstwist.xyz

Wayfinding and Getting Lost

The work is a narration that reflects Farzad’s memories within the built environments they’ve been living in, through their own wayfinding and disorientations. Farzad intends to read the transient nature of the cities they lived in, in conjunction with their spatial productions. They aim to maintain a critical perspective towards social and political issues within the promised spaces—of the future—through their own psycho-somatic experiences that are not specific to their case, yet for generations that for the hope of a better life have been deciding to migrate to the “west”. From the “Middle East” to the “Near East” and from there to Europe. A transformation that involved education and practices related to architecture and designing new homes and offices—with a longing for similar spaces for self—to digital media and technology-adjacent studies.

The Purifier

Walking down towards the vanishing point an architecture firm comes into view. There must be a handful of them around. Offices that are hand in hand with urban developers who desire “spacious, barrier-free condominiums that leave nothing to be desired for their future residents. High ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows, and modern equipment to ensure, you immediately feel at home.” Offices that to satisfy the master’s desires should utilize digital tools. Three-dimensional software that ensure abstract geometries within the limited Cartesian coordinates, ending up with analogic forms and hierarchies. A homogenizer and purifier that makes the windows, doors, stairs, walls, desks, people, animals, work, sport, food, and feelings look the same, become the same.

Topological Space

The spectacle mutates itself through production of spaces, constructing and re-constructing spectacular again and again in an endless twist. A wicked process that brands fresh products, the same as neighboring ancients with small alteration of attaching the letter “A”, that represents a present “haunted by the ghosts of lost futures”. The construction as a recipe to fix a future that is already expired. An era that seemingly dwells through renderings. It’s not so hard to feel the desperate effort of the fabric to look alike architect’s deceptious imagination.

A fabrication that not only animates the ideals on a surface, but incorporates a manifold of material and labor. An excavation that reveals a topological space under continuous deformations; stretching, twisting, crumpling, and bending land, and water. Water becomes the captive of the master’s plan, committed to distract and entertain spectators, from the temporality of the transformation. A muddy water indeed, that not only blurs the liminality of the space, but also makes it possible for the opportunist to fish in.

Non-orientable Surface

This area is like that assignment, with many unanswered questions and ambiguities. To drift here is like to move self in one direction and experience it all at once as everything repeats and doubles itself. The time passes and the ground moves under my feet. While inside becomes outside, outside become inside.5 The space loses its identity as it could be everywhere, and the agency of the maker, designer, owner, and user emulates and fades away…

To explore the constructed 3D space and listen to the narration visit endlesstwist.xyz and endlesstwist.xyz/publication to access the online open HTML publication

Sound and dramaturgy: Gabriela Valdespino
With support of Schwankhalle Bremen and peira collective

Endless Twist publication in print format
More about the project and related events