I’ve all the time believed that artwork is just not there to solely adorn our realities. It may be there to problem it, to hang-out it, to rehumanise it. At its greatest, artwork holds reminiscence the place establishments fail, offers form to voices historical past has tried to erase, and creates areas the place folks might as soon as once more really feel seen with dignity and complexity. This perception has guided an necessary phase of my work – throughout movie, music and visible artwork, and maybe nowhere extra clearly than in serving to produce the primary Kyrgyz Pavilion on the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.

That undertaking mattered to me not solely as a historic cultural second, however as a result of it answered a deeper want: the necessity to create visibility the place there had been absence. For a lot of communities, significantly these typically handled as peripheral by the dominant artwork world, illustration isn’t impartial. To create a platform is already a political act. To insist on nuance, poetry and self-definition is an act of resistance.

The Kyrgyz Pavilion was, for me, about making room – for an additional story, one other rhythm of thought, one other cultural creativeness to look by itself phrases inside one of many world’s most symbolically charged artwork areas. In a world setting the place narratives are filtered by way of energy, marketability and hierarchy, merely opening that area felt important. It jogged my memory that artwork can nonetheless act as a type of restoration: not correcting historical past, however rebalancing presence.

That very same impulse runs by way of PATH, my documentary characteristic movie undertaking from our artistic collective We R The Nomads.

PATH was born from a want to discover inside and collective motion directly: how folks carry reminiscence, displacement, fracture and hope throughout landscapes and generations. I’m drawn to what survives by way of passage, what stays when identities are interrupted and inherited narratives change into unstable. In that sense, PATH is just not solely a title, however a philosophy. A path will be chosen, inherited, misplaced or imagined. It’s all the time each intimate and political.

What pursuits me deeply is how artwork and movie create pathways the place none appear seen. A murals can’t cease violence or resolve injustice by itself. However it will probably open emotional floor that makes change doable. Makes reconsidering a perspective doable. It may reawaken sensitivity in a tradition that has change into numb. It may invite encounters and notion the place there was separation. And it will probably remind us that human beings are greater than the roles historical past assigns them.

That is particularly necessary to me as an artist working throughout borders and disciplines. Probably the most very important gestures typically occur within the in-between on the borderlines: between cinema and set up, between music and reminiscence, between documentary and dream. I don’t see artwork as a hard and fast object, however as a dwelling discipline of relations: between folks, pictures, histories, sounds and doable futures.

That can be why I care about creating occasions, not solely completed works. A significant cultural occasion can change into a brief neighborhood. It gathers folks round a shared vibration, a shared query, a shared second of consideration. In an atomised world, that issues. It issues to create areas the place artwork is just not consumed passively, however skilled as presence and alternate. It’s a large alternative for movies to create influence past what they may have accomplished skilled in isolation.

If PATH carries hope, it isn’t naïve hope. It’s rooted in motion and within the perception that artwork can shift notion, and that notion is the place change begins. Actual change not often begins as coverage. It begins earlier: in creativeness, in empathy, within the second somebody recognises themselves or one other in another way. To make artwork is to refuse disappearance. To insist that tales and sensibilities pushed to the margins nonetheless comprise gentle, intelligence and consequence. The duty is just not solely to characterize the world, however to reopen it. And maybe that’s the reason I proceed to create. To construct paths by way of picture, sound and kind the place new encounters can occur, and the place tradition should still assist us change into extra human to at least one one other.

Firouz FarmanFarmaian born in 1973 in Tehran, Iran, is a recent artist, writer, composer, and cultural producer based mostly between the South of France and Essaouira, Morocco. As a Cultural Ambassador of the Kyrgyz Republic (2021-2023) and co-founder of We R The Nomads Company, he bridges dialogues between cultures. His work contains the set up Gates of Turan on the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and ongoing undertaking Shiraz 77 (2021-2025). Firouz can be a musician with a number of gold-certified albums, composed the soundtrack for his docu-film PATH ( We R The Nomads Company, 2025) with post-rock ensemble FORRM, and is at present creating a brand new characteristic movie, Season of the Witch. His creative follow spans visible arts, movie, music, and expertise, exploring themes of transformation and cultural dialogue.

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