"The leading character-you, Oleg lights a candle.It's a thin, uncertain, weak flame, and you cover this flame with your hand, the hand of a strong, grown man. And you walk across the foul bed of the pool, trying not to slip or stumble, and all your will is concentrated on one thing: to save this weak flame, to keep it burning. But it goes out and you return to where you started, and again you light this uncertain, quivering flame, once again you shield it with your palm and set off."
The performance is based on the final scene of Andrea Tarkovsky’s movie(‘Nostalgia’, 1983). The scene shows the leading character (the poet, Oleg Yankovsky) carrying a burning candle through the path of the Saint Catherine pool. The law is that every time the lighted candle goes out, he has to return to the beginning of the path and start moving again.
In this performance, the lit candle is moved along an important street in Tehran. Azadi Street in Tehran, connects two important points:
Enghelab Square (means Revolution) and Azadi Square. (means Freedom). The performance starts from Enghelab Sq. towards Azadi Sq. and every time the candle is lit, it returns to the beginning of the path (Enghelab sq.). Of course, in this performance, the lighted candle never reaches the endpoint (Azadi Sq.), and in the twelfth attempt to move the lit candle, the candle melts completely, and the performance ends at this point.
"I had this idea of filming a man asleep in one continuous sequence, without any editing, from the moment he falls asleep at night to the moment he wakes up in the morning. Imagine what a subtle and grandiose range of human emotions would be reflected on his face at that time! Especially if he dreams."
The name of the work, entitled ‘Alef-Alef’, refers to the two points mentioned, which are taken from the first letters of the Persian names of the two points., (Both names were named after the 1978 or Iran Revolution and are still the most important venue for official and government demonstrations.)
On the other hand, the title refers to a fragment of the same name that cannot be correct in the geometry. Because two points of the same name can not form a line and are only one point, that line uses their definitions in physics to determine the difference between “distance” and “displacement.”Distance and displacement are two quantities that may seem to mean the same thing but have distinctly different definitions and meanings.
Distance is a scalar quantity that refers to “how much ground an object has covered” during its motion. Displacement is a vector quantity that refers to “how far out of place an object is”; it is the object’s overall change in position. If an object moves between point “A” and point “B,” the movement is equal to the length of the line. Whereas if the object returns to the first point (A), the displacement value is zero, even though the distance traveled.
" "Why a candle?" I queried. "Because of the flame, the unprotected fire."
In the video section, the performance is edited at the same time and not linearly or longitudinally. Each attempt to move the lit candle is somehow depicted in a separate loop frame. Besides all the frames, there is a candle clock that has nails on its body depending on the number of attempts. These nails are synchronized to the time of each frame. So this. When the candle in the first frame goes out, the first nail falls to the metallic base of the candle, and its sound is heard. And then step by step. with the appearance of the following frames in the performance, the symbolic candle becomes shorter and the nails separate from its body.
Each frame, which represents one of the alternative movements, appears in the previous movement. Exactly after the candle is off, whilst maintaining the sequence of movements in the performance, this goes on till the end. This synchronization of movements along the path or the choice of this type of montage removes the recorded performance from its cinematographic display. It shows the unsuccessful attempts to move the lit candle, every time in parallel with its history of recurrent memory and the past.
" If you can do that, if it happens and you carry the candle to the end in one shot, straight, without cinematic conjuring tricks and cut in editing, then maybe this act will be the true meaning of my life."
In the installation section, the metal bars are mounted to the wall, representing the timeline of this editing. The numbers On the bars indicate the length of the distances and are proportional to the size of the piece itself. The sum of these numbers is the total distance. (points A to A)
Here, we have a spatial definition of time. The entire distance was never traveled because the candle melts completely during the performance. But each attempt completes this failed displacement by placing the distances traveled. In other words, the temporal dimension of these round-trip routes is in the form of lines in different sizes of the spatial dimension of the pathway.
