Shahrzad Changalvaee & Constanza Alarcón Tennen

Utopia is the no-place where future remnants of a missing world can finally liberate the present from an overloaded history. Wounds are then allowed to turn into scars, scars into hope. The no-place of utopia is a place somewhere in between, where distant voices meet and fertilize. One wipes the tears of the other, while the other inspires the heart of the one. Victor Jara and Ahmad Shamloo probably never met. Shamloo, The Iranian poet came into Jara, the Chilean singer by grace. Something in Chile’s recent history resounded in the Iranian one, and lead the Iranian poet to translate some of the

The brutality of History hits in different ways the direct victims and those who, likes us two in Chile and in Iran, grew up as a following generation and lived the long-term consequences. Memory breathes heavily next to your ears, as an amorphous and heavy stepping monster, when culture and society do not face it, nor deal with its underlying presence.

Histories do not mirror each other but analogies recall one another. In 1953, a coup supported by the CIA took place in Iran right after the nationalization of oil. In 1973, a coup in Chile violently divided the nation in two, ending a process of social empowerment that included the nationalization of copper, and replaced it with a military dictatorship that installed torture, terror, and killing as pervasive practices. Victor Jara was killed in the aftermath of the Chilean coup. Ahmad Shamloo was isolated by the ideological regime after the Islamic revolution of Iran in 1979, which is considered a consequence of the 1953 coup.

We want to believe that parallel stories reverberate and we can make something out them, no matter how modest it may be. What has been recorded is barely enough to get a glimpse of the complexities of the places and people whose voices were silenced by violence.

In performing here we attempt to open a lyrical space where our separated geographies converge into a collective memory, both social and political; and where difference surrenders to what may be common: our hopes, sorrows, pains, songs and bodies.

Constanza Alarcón Tennen (b. 1986, Santiago, Chile) is a multidisciplinary artist. She graduated from Universidad Católica de Chile (BFA 2009) and from Yale University (MFA 2015). Her work has been shown internationally in groups and solo exhibitions such as Migratorry Patterns (NYC, 2015), Time Item, (New Haven, 2015), Y sin embargo se mueve (Santiago, 2012), among others. She is a founding member of Grupo < >, an organization of female artists of Latin American descent, dedicated to open a conversation around issues of politics, migration and identity of artists connected to a larger America. In recent projects they have shown their work and gave a series of lecture/performances called Subgenera of Contradictions. In 2010 she received a FONDART, a grant to develop the project Y sin embargo se mueve and for the publication of catalogue. She was awarded with a CONICYT scholarship that allowed her to pursue her MFA studies. In 2015 she received the Susan H. Whedon Award for outstanding student in Sculpture when she graduated from her MFA. In April 2016, she will be participating in the AIM program of the Bronx Museum. Constanza lives and works between Santiago and NYC.

Shahrzad Changalvaee (b. 1983, Tehran, Iran) is a multidisciplinary artist. In her works, she links different mediums, uses studio materials and found images to build narratives around language, desire and the process of making. She received her BA from Tehran University in 2009 and her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. Her work has been shown in different exhibitions and venues such as "Video Mixer" (Philadelphia, 2016), "Ksi,Ein and An" (New York, 2015), "Time Item" (New Haven, 2015), among others. Since 2013, she has been working on Two-Headed Imagonacy, an on-going lecture-performance project in collaboration with Iman Raad. The project speaks about the relation between art and history with focus on Persian Script. In 2011 she received the runner-up prize from Magic of Persia Contemporary Art Prize. Shahrzad lives and works between New Haven and NYC.