2025-Ongoing“I remember seeing a spider on a seesaw. I was scared and threw myself off it. I remember the spider, but not the pain or the scars on my body. The perspective shifts—from my point of view to my father’s. I remember his camera’s angle, but not mine,” Meshkat recalled.”
We (Meshkat Talebi & Mana Tashakorinia) began watching a vast archive of home movies made by Meshkat’s father, later gifted to her. What started as a fun activity led us to trace obscure imprints of violence and archiviolence woven into those mundane (or banal) moments. Meshkat had witnessed domestic violence since early childhood, but discovering cryptic inscriptions of those violations in the footage made us reflect on how violence and archiviolence intertwine and how our collective memory is shaped through the epistemology and language of these archives—created (primarily) by a dominator. In response, we decided to un-learn them by locating fractures within these home movies.
The archive, both in its etymology and function, is tied to authority, order, and power. * Yet, these home movies are the only remnants offered to us by the dominant narrator/recorder. We began excavating them, making sense of them through a feminist gaze. We acknowledged that these fragmented pieces of mnemonics had shaped our visual and tactile cognition.
We later decided to make a film—re-watching and re-doing the archive, filling its narrative gaps with “what is ours.”
A short fiction film is set to be a final outcome of the project and this research period is crucial to make the project final. In terms of film language, dark humor serves as a tool to navigate and mediate trauma without sugarcoating its reality. “In the videos, a sense of humor in the visual culture and the way they were edited appealed to me. He was humorous and communicative when filming. I remember him in two contradictory ways; one touched with fear and distance, and the other, by the humor in the films. I always carried this contradiction. What I make today with camera is neither reality nor fantasy; neither truth nor lie. I am always moving between the two, and what connects these two realms is irony.”
1- From Sketch Research:
2- Visual Effects Of The Home-Movies:
3- Intro Of the Home-Movies:
4- Visual Anthropology: