Central to the DIASPORA PROJECT are administrative documents conveyed by my grandfather during the Assyrian genocide and following his forced deportation from his home region surrounding Lake Urmia in what is now northwestern Iran.

I approach the documents not only as texts to be translated and read, but as objects and images to be encountered materially. Inscribed in Ottoman Turkish, Aramaic, and Russian, they are illegible to me. They appear not first as language, but as matter.

This metaphysical shift from document to object reframes interpretation itself. The documents cease functioning primarily as carriers of administrative meaning and instead emerge as tectonic surfaces: folded, stamped, creased, weathered, compressed. The topography of folds, the spatial logic of creases, the transient and obsessive choreographies of ink, and the placement and implied percussiveness of administrative seals and stamps carry forms of pressure and memory not fully reducible to translation. Resulting are FORMAL IMAGINARIES — Unlikely Alliance and Folded Landscape (see below).

From the FORMAL IMAGINARIES series. Unlikely Alliance (2025). Concrete, watercolor – an unlikely alliance of materials with distinct and opposed natures: the one, heavy and stable; the other, light and fugitive. Below is a sample of ovoid, concrete vessels (8” diameter x 5” high) – sculptural transmutations of the ovoid shape of the documents’ two-dimensional seals.

From the FORMAL IMAGINARIES series. Folded Landscape (maquette, 2025). A “diasporic floor” would be composed of twelve bronze panels corresponding to the twelve folded sections of the document above. Scaled for public assembly, the work transforms the fold into an architectural condition through which viewers physically traverse instability, disorientation, and displacement. The bronze echoes the material memory of ancient Assyria while simultaneously functioning as a contemporary spatial threshold.