The spacers

In Hengâm, an island in the Persian Gulf, Melika Shafahi proposes a new vision of insularity through her pictures, which reflect as much the particularity of the place, its materiality, as its everyday life. The insularity depicted in Melika Shafahi’s photos emanates from her own personal relationship with this space, and the links that this island has with the dominant worlds surrounding it (Arabic, Iranian, Indian…). A universe built on the periphery, distinguished by its languages, beliefs, colours and everyday life. Melika questions and seeks to confuse the positions of the observed and the observer by introducing images of landscapes imported from elsewhere and interposed in the living environments of the young inhabitants of the island. Will they be able to reach each other through their hybrid histories of island space or that of the diaspora? It is this search for a different link with the inhabitants that motivates Melika’s work, a link that requires no less an initiatory ritual such as the Zâr between them, so that each may exorcise the frontiers separating them and take possession of the spirit of the other. It is in Melika Shafahi’s video that this modern ritual unfolds: the Hengâmi teenagers walk along the beach and the alleys of the island and take Melika and her camera with them as she attempts to capture them on their own territory. Turning cartwheels, twisting their bodies, running here and there until the camera loses its way as it tries to follow; as if in an initiatory ritual, the island’s self-assured boys make Melika feel the distance that separates them, the very distance she wants to go beyond by abandoning herself to their movement. Melika’s video is the image of her own struggle against what she represents towards the island’s inhabitants. But it is also a journey that shows them at the heart of their living space in a materiality that echoes the world as much, thanks to the soundtrack that accompanies them, as it reminds them of their distance from it.