Attar

Fragrances of the Quran

A memoir of scent, tethering intergenerational scent memories and ritual to the natural world and its life cycles. Through the intersection of ethno-botany and olfactory anthropology, this collection of poetry and essay, surveys jasmine, rose, and the aromatic plants mentioned in Islam, while mending our relationship to sacred ecologies as stewards of the land. Thereby, restoring ecological histories from orientalist frameworks–a critical discourse often  left out of contemporary climate dialogues.  

In development, with support from Creative West. Artist Fund.

Language of Dreams

An experimental anthology decoding the relationship between language, diasporic imagination, and cultural memory. Through experimental poetry and visual design found in Iranian spiritual systems, this project uses form to complicate translation, as a metaphor for the  displacement  of the diaspora’s collective imagination/expression.

Language of Dreams prompts the creation of new linguistic frameworks through restorative praxis found inside Persian household rituals and objects, as an invitation to renegotiate the distance between the absences of what can not be translated. A para-text emerges across the footnotes where historical discourses are preserved as a site of placemaking.

In development, with support from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Recipes for Care

Care Labs explores how creative landscapes shift when handled with care. As a student of the Arts and Healing Initiative, I prototyped a lab that centers and supports caregivers in building a sustainable art practice through storytelling. Collectively, we self-published a (limited run) anthology titled Recipes for Care.

Cover art by Marina Ochoa.