Occidentalism.us

Actor Playing the Director, Actor Playing the Interpreter, Actor Playing the Shepherd (2026) is presented as a companion work to the artist's forthcoming film چشمه Cheshmeh (2027). 100 years following the 1925 silent ethnographic documentary Grass, a descendant of one of the documentary's depicted shepherds of the Bakhtiari and Sangesari tribes adapts the film on an industrial agricultural pomegranate and pistachio field in the Central Valley of California. Filmed on-location between Kern County, California and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., a series of staged oral history interviews and re-enactments between an actor playing a director, an actor playing an interpreter, and an actor playing a shepherd speaking between the Sangesari and Persian languages follows a viewing of 35mm safety reels of Grass at the Library of Congress. In the dialogue, the actors rehearse lines negotiating the distance of a well, and a reservoir, from their township. The installation is accompanied with a publicly-accessible website aggregating live-data from specific monitoring locations in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Water Dashboard on California groundwater levels which are situated in California's Central Valley. In the appropriation of water during Gold Rush-era disputes, the California Supreme Court's ruling in Irwin v. Philips (1855) would create a legal doctrine which facilitated the expropriation of land and resources by sanctioning contemporary settlers’ diversion of water for mining ‘claims’, staked land with speculative extractable natural resources. The claim is identifiable as the nexus and point where natural resource diversion, or extraction, can and would occur in any given circumstance. In contemporary financial markets, a claim denotes a right to speculative future returns or ownership of commodities. For the duration of the installation, four parcels of land respectively bordering the furthest north-west, furthest south-west, furthest south-east, and furthest north-east property lines of an industrial agricultural pomegranate and pistachio farm in the Central Valley of California will be solicited on behalf of the artist by the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University. The monetary lease of the four parcels of land will be determined and procured at the current valuation of a brokerage account of gold-backed ETFs. The brokerage account has been unencumbered since its last performed transaction on April 28, 2021 by the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery on the artist's behalf as part of the artist's exhibition Public Sculpture 001-C (2021). The four parcels of land will serve as sites for server-satellite towers as part of a forthcoming work supported by the 2026 Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) Lightning Fund.