Filmmaker & Cinematographer

Live & Experimental

Sound & moving image

Live audiovisual performance and experimental moving-image work.

DIWAN / VOL. I

Sit Around the Fire

2026 · Live audiovisual performance · The Hackney Room, London

A live audiovisual work moving from a solitary, embodied experience towards a collective one. Across landscape, ritual, labour, music and movement, the work looks at one recurring human impulse: to gather.

01 / 19 · Photo

Bicep — Apricots · 60 seconds

Manifesto

SIT AROUND THE FIRE We begin alone. A body. A landscape. A moment that seems entirely our own. Then another voice enters. Another body. Another gesture. What felt private begins to reveal itself as something inherited. Across places and generations, people have gathered to sing, carry, build, harvest, dance, work, pray, eat, remember and sit beside fire. These gestures are not the same, and this work does not ask them to be. It places them beside one another to notice a recurrence: the human impulse to gather. The archive is not only where the past is kept. It is one of the ways the past continues to arrive. A voice recorded decades ago can enter a room that did not yet exist, heard by bodies its singer could never have imagined. Sit Around the Fire moves from an embodied moment to a collective moment. It asks whether discovering that others have felt what we feel makes the experience less personal, or whether it gives that feeling company. We were never the first to gather. We will not be the last. The apparatus changes. The gesture does not. To gather in front of a projection is to sit around a fire.

Credits & courtesy

• Music: ANNA, I See Miracles Everywhere; Bicep, Apricots.
• Musiques et Rites de Perse: The Dervishes of Najjar. Images and sound by Priscilla Telmon. Produced by Petites Planètes / Vincent Moon. Courtesy of Petites Planètes. Vimeo
• Musiques et Rites de Perse: Zoorkhaneh. Vincent Moon / Petites Planètes, filmed at Saheb Al-Zaman Zurkhaneh, Yazd. Courtesy of Petites Planètes. Vimeo
• Zagros. Directed and produced by Shahab Mihandoust and Ariane Lorrain. Courtesy of the filmmakers. Shahab Mihandoust
• Dingomaro. Directed by Kamran Heidari. Courtesy of Kamran Heidari / rights holders. Vimeo
• Nowruz. Directed by Naghmeh Pour, produced by Sara Samsøe Moghaddas / New Land. Courtesy of the filmmakers. Vimeo
• Flatland. Directed by Alireza Keymanesh and Amir Pousti, produced by 33Projects. Courtesy of the filmmakers. Keymanesh Website
• Music of the Bakhshis of Khorasan. Directed by Behrooz Vojdani and Hamid Angaji; produced by the Iranian Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization. Courtesy of ICHHTO / UNESCO. UNESCO
• Qālišuyān Rituals of Mašhad-e Ardehāl in Kāšān. Courtesy of ICHHTO / UNESCO. ICH UNESCO
• Sadeh / Sada Celebration. Courtesy of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. ICH UNESCO
• Castells. Directed by Pedro & James, James Worsley and Pedro de la Fuente, produced by Autobahn. Courtesy of the filmmakers. Vimeo
• Every True Person of Kalofer Without Freedom Can't Live. Directed by Joya Berrow, produced for NOWNESS. Courtesy of Joya Berrow / NOWNESS. Vimeo
Additional archival, documentary and ritual imagery appears courtesy of the respective filmmakers, communities, archives and rights holders.

The Awe

2024 · Live audiovisual performance

01 / 03 · Photo