Hand press
lab. A press that travels.

Beyond the fog of propaganda lie body bags of cedars, mountains filled with missiles, and birds carrying instruments of war; everything here smells like death.

This project showcases death, and the justification of it, in the high-contrast societies surrounded by the fog of propaganda, specifically in Iran. This project also tries to engage participants and visitors not to teach a technique, but to make spaces for an artistic, social-human interaction and conversation as a way out of totalitarianism.

Death Culture is run as a hand-printing kiosk, set up with a press, a table and one small set of carved blocks wherever the lab is hosted. Rather than teaching a technique, it asks each visitor to decide where the body bags belong on the sheet, to press them down themselves, and to take the print home with them afterwards. Because the same few blocks are used all day, the only thing that changes from one poster to the next is the person standing at the table, which is why some sheets come out crowded and almost black while others stay nearly empty. Totalitarianism survives by removing the space in which people decide anything together in public, and a table where strangers work out between them where a body bag belongs restores a little of that space. The posters that leave with them are documentation of that artistic, social-human interaction rather than the point of it.