Memories of Loitering brings moments from the artist’s past and present together through a spatiotemporal experience of mapping and slow burn. In its overlaying of images and sounds, the piece meditates on the dislocation and accumulation of the residues of a past, which continue to form an embodied understanding of the disjointed present.
A central element of the work are excerpts from a written transcript of a conversation with the artist’s grandmother in 2016, right around the time she began to lose her memory and most cognitive abilities. In this conversation, the artist’s grandmother repeatedly asks the same questions from Khoshgozaran about returning, her current place of residence, and inquiries about the possibility of her “visiting home,” as if in an act of refusal to consolidate the artist’s exile. Charting the slow decay of the mind, which inhibits the ability to console and make sense of the artist’s immigration, Memories of Loitering contrasts the slow drift of one’s life with the impossibility of return through virtual means and decaying archives.