CAVITIES

Piano-trio-in-five-movements and video

collaboration with Niloufar Nourbakhsh

Premier with Chamber music America, April 2025, San Francisco

Two channel installation presentation, August 2025

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Cavities is a piano trio that features interactive visual elements, unfolding in five movements, exploring the theme of displacement. Visceral, ethereal, and emotionally resonant, the piece is a collaborative effort to embark on an embodied journey of the displaced. In an era of mass immigration, where the concept of borders becomes increasingly complex, our piece seeks to contextualize the geographically specific root causes of displacement.

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In selecting our visual archives, we aimed to evoke a historical account of events following the 1979 revolution .The first movement gradually reveals archival footage from the March 8, 1979, mass protests in Iran against the compulsory hijab mandate. This footage, sourced from the film Year Zero, one of the few accessible moving image archives from that period, is activated by the score through amplitude, emerging in a circular shape. The trills in the score highlight the volatility of the imagery itself.

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As the piece progresses, the visuals guide us through the 1990s and the 2009 election protests, seen through the personal lens of the artists navigating their school years. These scenes are in part juxtaposed against images from Year Zero of women chanting against the compulsory hijab. One artist is shown preparing for her first year of school in 1997, fully covered from head to toe from her pajamas, while another, a high school student in 2009, is depicted in a spelling dictation class, writing words that painfully resonate with the social context of the time—misdemeanor, crime, abstract concepts, eye sockets, conflict, and more. The timeline continues into the fourth movement, briefly showing schoolchildren in 2022 chanting "Woman, Life, Freedom" and removing their scarves.

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It was inevitable to break our timeline to invoke the 1953 coup, a critical moment in Iranian history. The 1953 US and UK-backed coup in Iran, an attempt by the West to prevent the nationalization of Iranian oil, led to years of unrest and limited democratic access. Abstract imagery and archival material related to Iran’s oil industry, drawn from the Pathe archives and the film A Fire (یک آتش), serve as our portal to this period.

 

The film A Fire, directed by Ebrahim Golestan and edited by the prominent Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, depicts an oil well fire near Ahvaz in southern Iran, with firemen working tirelessly day and night to extinguish it.

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