To Tehran in My Dreams
To Tehran in My Dreams is a performance that uses the mishaps of telegraph messages to produce a narrative of illogical, surrealist digressions and divergences. It takes time, fragments sentences, where the cross of a t is made into an ellipsis, the dot of an i into a full stop. The work celebrates and disrupts the linearity and repetition of the automatic regenerator machine and argues for error and for the radical consciousness of love to lay the groundwork for a revolution.
To Tehran in My Dreams traces the historical development of long-distance communication. Through digressions – such as the life story of W.J. Elms, an employee of the Eastern and Associated Telegraph Companies, who made an error of a single punctuation mark, and painter Samuel Morse who developed the Morse code – Himali’s emotive narrative unfolds the idea that language works like electricity, connecting sender and receiver, and that love is a glitch that can disrupt the linear logics of time and capital.