Hollow Bodies, Inevitable Threads

In collective crises, the body becomes hollow.

It becomes empty of safety, of signs, of movement, of the proximities that previously made the world identifiable to it. Hands that once reached out in greeting no longer do. Feet that once danced take refuge in stillness. And body language, its rhythms, needs, and urgencies begin to disappear. To vanish.

Not just the absence of individuals, but the absence of presence: How a body can exist yet remain invisible; How identity, under pressure, thins out and vanishes. Crisis doesn't just damage, it hollows. It drains the body of its self-defining rituals and reduces it to mere survival.

If the body disappears, what can remain? A trace of that body, the thing closest to its skin? Can those hold space for it? Clothes, those soft witnesses! Objects devoid of flesh but still holding its shape. I ask myself: Can gathering clothes emptied of bodies bring the absent ones back together? Not for a return, but to build a new reality where absence is named, collected, recorded, and processed anew?

But such a gathering must not be symbolic. It must not remain merely at the level of a gesture. The world has crossed the threshold of violence to merely be a spectator. In these fast, forgetful, and disembodied times, participation cannot be a choice; it becomes a necessity. Solace is not achieved through observing. It emerges from making. Collective action in art—when it slows us down, stretches time, and returns the "mind" to the speed of the "hand"—becomes one of the few remaining strategies for presence. It neither cures nor brings an end. It becomes a pause. And this pause is enough for a body to be reflected back, thread by thread.

When I encountered the project "The Length of Distance" by Golrokh Nafisi, I looked at it not as an outside observer, but as someone who had previously been entangled in these very knots and questions.

Fabric Remembers

"In our absence, when we are with no one, what is present?" Golrokh begins with this question. And throughout the performance, a space is created where this question can be touched. The premise of the work is—strangely—simple: a letter to friends and strangers in Tehran, requesting them to send an old piece of clothing, a garment that has spent its life in a closet. And subsequently, the clothes become part of a collective project.

The process occurs in three stations:

Registration: Each garment is registered with a number and name, as if entering an archive of "absence." Abstract absence becomes precise.

Unstitching (Unsewing): Participants wearing masks and sitting at a distance from one another sit together to unpick the clothes thread by thread. Spectators are put to "work". Every seam is opened by hand. Threads are pulled slowly. Golrokh says it feels like "autopsying someone's body." This opening is neither destruction nor preservation. It is a form of generative collapse.

Resewing: The pieces that were torn apart are sewn onto a new fabric, a massive coat, where no single piece is identifiable, yet all are present.

Clothes are empty bodies. Witnesses to absence, and simultaneously, its vessel. To touch these clothes is to touch an invisible body. To open their seams means opening the memory of the body, with care. This process is neither destruction nor preservation, it is a kind of "unbecoming". Halberstam calls this queer failure: not a downfall, but a refusal to be recognizable within normative systems. In this project, failure is woven into the structure. Each garment must lose its former shape to become part of the whole. This disintegration is necessary. Only in being torn apart does the possibility of being sewn together exist.

Intertwining

In this project, I recognize myself, not as a participant, but as someone trying to find something from the heart of absence. Golrokh stages absence with clarity. The registration station names each absence meticulously. The unstitching station performs absence with slowness. Resewing neither promises nor denies the possibility of return. But in the end, the massive coat is hoisted up from the window. The sound of a sewing machine, the sound of making, broadcasts from a loudspeaker. Presence is announced through absence.

Absence is often violent. Bodies that do not choose to be absent are forced into invisibility. Can such bodies be celebrated? Or must they be mourned first? "The Length of Distance" creates space for both. The final coat is "beautiful in the experience of equality, and painful in the absence of society."

I return to "unstitching", the most radical act of the project. The power lies not in the final garment, but in the process of opening it. Sitting for hours and pulling threads from fabric is a form of resistance against the rhythm of crisis. It is the reweaving of time. Slowing down to the point where body and mind merge into one another again. It is right here that coexistence begins, not in the complete object, but in the slowness of shared labour. The sound of a sewing machine broadcasting from a window and turning into a public sign. This hearing is a political act. Not a performance, but a proof: we are here, we are sewing, even in our distance. It is a reminder that collective work has a voice. That absence, if you listen to it, has a rhythm. That distant bodies can still create a beat.

Unfinished Threads

I don't know if resewing clothes can truly redefine identity. I don't know if active participation in collective art can truly soothe a crisis. I don't know if absence, once made visible, truly resolves itself or not. But I do know that in "The Length of Distance", something else occurs: a state is held, not resolved. A body is not recovered, but it is remembered. A distance is not filled, but it is marked. A coat is hoisted up—not as an ending, but as a collective breath. And perhaps this is what must be seen: not that what is broken is repaired; but that it holds it within itself. That a thread, when entrusted to many hands, is not always for repairing, sometimes it is enough for it to just remain.