Bullshit Speech

Performance
2024
Presented at Cut Up 3 Festival, Alternative Workhouse, Tehran

The work originated from a personal habit of joining together words encountered in the street while walking or driving, forming texts that appeared meaningless. Despite their lack of narrative coherence, these combinations inevitably carried the social and political atmosphere of their surroundings. The method relates to Dadaist practices and cut-up techniques, yet here it functions as an act against a system that imposes order through language.
The performance took place in a space containing a large mirror whose surface was covered with official newspapers. Copies of the same newspapers were placed on each seat. A live video feed of the street, recorded by one of the performers on a mobile phone, was projected onto the covered mirror.
Two performers stood before this surface, repeating a text played through loudspeakers. At a certain point, one performer refuses to continue reading the newspaper and turns attention toward the live street image. Gradually both begin reading the street itself. Language detaches from official media and becomes fed by the living environment. What emerges is speech without linear coherence, yet charged with situation.
A third performer enters the space with a camera, filming the audience. Their image appears on the same surface. Mirror, newspaper, street image, and spectators’ reflections overlap. In the end, the performers sit among the audience, dissolving the division between stage and auditorium.
Here, language is not a vehicle of meaning but an unstable material circulating between official media, the street, image, and bodies.