How did the idea of the calendar come about?
It comes from a few different places, each with their own weight of influence. I love to see photography and writing come together, music and photography come together. I love print, I love zines.
At the start of my photography in high school I was also always obsessively writing poetry. A teacher of mine had pulled me aside and put me on to the poetry slam scene. All of a sudden, at 15, I was on stage competing and performing spoken word pieces using metaphor to call out the U.S. education system and war on Iraq. Simultaneously, there was this observation I had growing up of my mother and her calendars she would buy from the grocery store. She’d always go for something visually aspirational like “Greek islands” (one day I’ll take her there) or “travel through Spain” (she’s from Sevilla and her Andalusian character is a big anchor in her very different American life). These calendars would be taped up to the left side of the stove and with her swirly angular handwriting she’d fill in each calendar with things like “Feria de abril” (an important cultural holiday in Andalucia) or “Norouz” (Persian New Year aka spring equinox – my dad is from Shiraz so we always celebrate).
This calendar zine is a synthesis of all of that. It’s a space I’ve created in my practice to introduce those expressions and influences to one another and see what can happen. To look at these objects of daily use we have in our homes and see how we naturally edit them to make sense of the culture of the space they exist in.
#Decolonising #Day #Calendar #Zine #Carmen #Daneshmandi
