Knock, Mark, Stitch

Knock, Mark, Stitch is a collaborative, multimedia project, focused on the idea of dislocation, isolation, presence, and absence. The cross-generational memory of isolation and confinement amplifies the weight of the experience of migration, which has been central to Setare Arashloo and Iran Sanadzadeh’s works and has affected their experience of migration to Australia and the United States. Growing up with former prisoners of conscience as parents and relatives, the artists have been playfully reassembling the displaced products of isolation and material as modules of a shared past in their recent collaborative works.

In Knock, Mark, Stitch performance at Panoply Performance Lab, Long-distance collaborators Setare Arashloo, Iran Sanadzadeh, and Angus Mason performed their first live performance of their work together. This performance of video, percussion, and embroidery, was the construction of their work on the role of objects and detailed, sometimes mundane, repetitive processes and our relationship to them in confined spaces. Setare and Iran interacted with and disrupted the projected images of animated gestures, by stitching onto the hanging screen. The animated video is a composition of gestures and moments that were previously performed and animated based on three stories that had been collected by the Setare Arashloo in a series of interviews with former political prisoners in Iran. The hidden performers, performed through the stitched marks while Angus Mason Improvised on drums. The sound component of the performance was a semi-improvisational composition by Sanadzadeh for drums, based on the Morse code translation of the interview text. These three elements are individual in their presentation, but overlap in space. The performance took place on July 7th, 2018 marks the second performed iteration.