The artist shares some of the experiences that originated the photograph shown in the 18th Festival. He discusses his trips to the United States, between 2009 and 2012, when he attended the Beltane, a pagan fertility ritual celebrated between spring and summer. During the ritual, Mohallem claims he discovered the other as a complex, desiring being, changing his common-sense perceptions that the freedom of a being is related to the existence of clear-cut boundaries to the space of the Self. On the contrary, in the spirituality championed by the artist, one’s freedom exists solely to the extent that he attributes it equally to other subjects. He tells of what it was like to recover the experience of the rite without directly registering it. He also touches on the connections between this piece and later series of his, in which he explored his family origins in Lebanon.
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