The Echo of Protest is Distant
to the Protest
to the Protest
Book Design
2025
Author: Nazanin Noori
Edited by: Nan Xi, Nazanin Noori, Fabian Schöneich
Graphic design: Elisabetta Porcinai
Translation: Robert Schlicht
Proofreading: Rachel Walther
Printing: Sportflieger, Berlin
Published by: Spector Books
Nazanin Noori’s artist book THE ECHO OF PROTEST IS DISTANT TO THE PROTEST is an expansion of her solo exhibition of the same title at CCA Berlin in 2024, where the artist merged sound, sculpture, and text to create an immersive installation addressing the psychic aftermath of political protest. While emerging from the recent resistant movement against the Islamic Republic of Iran sparked off by Jina Amini’s death in 2022, the sonic-poetic assemblage also goes far beyond this context, delving into the digital dissemination of protest more broadly, the emotional (im)mobilization of the public, and the spectatorship of suffering.
At the heart of the book is a graphic poem composed by Noori in English, which extends the exhibition’s word sculptures. Across the pages, words from the long poem overwrite a Shia ritual chant in Farsi, (“O Kufians, You Who Are Faithless”). Originally written by Shahab Mousavi as a lament for the Battle of Karbala—a tragic event in Shia Islam commemorated annually during Muharram—the chant was first performed during ceremonies in Yazd, Iran in 2012 by an allmale choir, and later repurposed as a political slogan in the Jina Amini protests.
In a graphic polyptych dialogue, the Farsi chant embodies a patriarchal chorus, while the English poem offers a subversive feminist commentary, voiced by the artist herself.
There’s No There There
Performance + Installation
2024
Performance view at Großer Wasserspeicher, Berlin, with Dylan Kerr, Marie Gailey, Davide Luciani.
Stills from video © Stefano Cavanese.
“There’s No There There” is a site-specific sonic performance and installation by Elisabetta Porcinai, Marie Gailey, Dylan Kerr and Davide Luciani. A piece for three voices and electronics leveraging the unique resonant properties of Berlin’s Großer Wasserspeicher, a former water reservoir.
The performance consists of two complementary parts that merge into one another as performers and audience move through the space. Three voices gradually multiply and overlap until a soundscape of suspended overtones gradually dissolves into synthetic abstraction. The progressive disintegration of a voice that once was, leaves room for the projection of mirages, suggestions, fears, desires, in a closed circuit that inevitably goes back to itself.
Goro-Goro
Object-Book
2025
Poesia estesa Goro-goro" by Gozō Yoshimasu, edited by Marco Mazzi and published by Villa Rondinelli Editions.
This multilingual edition features the first Italian translation of Yoshimasu's long poem "Goro-goro" and includes an essay by Professor Masaki Horiuchi.
The book-object was created based on the idea of a moving landscape - or rather, a map - depicting the very locus of the poet’s wanderings: the Ryūkyū Islands (“Nansei Islands” in Japanese).
The hesitations and rips in language thus result in clusters of black landmasses, at times submerged again by white billows at the turn of each page. The island becomes now a lump of meaning, now a gash, a gap in memory, in experience. The island is presence, now absence, potentiality. Language, and even letters, are torn apart, emptied or disappear almost entirely, eroded by the paper.
Linguistic paralysis, the difficult - pathological - advance of language and thought, the lability of mind, memory, the crisis of symbol, silences: the aspects present in Yoshimasu’s poem are concretely embodied in the materiality of this object-book.
EPRC – BODIES
Record Design
2024
Original artwork and design for EPRC’s first LP BODIES (in collaboration with Roberto Crippa) released by Stray Signals. White vinyl.
