Amnesia

After years a being finds out that every thing that s/he has done was based on his/her memory and the memory of the whole world and tries to delete his/her memory. (prod-note)

Somewhere on a distant planet in a dying universe, filmmaker Shadab Shayegan has a waxen-looking figure reflect forlornly on the past. Sketches gathered over the years, stowed away in an old-fashioned chest, wait to be deciphered. A seemingly hopeless undertaking: the strange drawings evade all interpretation by the world dweller. What remains is a premonition of something irretrievably lost, which like a weak echo—similar to the sound of the big bang—resounds incomprehensibly from a distant time. Trailing off ever more. Soon, also the knowledge of the final line of this existence, which has become a dystopic outer-space fairytale, will be lost in the void of total amnesia.
Hearing the being’s thoughts: this was once a place full of stars that serve(d) the inhabitants as nourishment; the cosmos is meanwhile depleted, they were crazed by hunger. The relationship to the surroundings and ultimately, to their own existence was cut off. What happens with our ideas when we disappear? Where do we go? Who am I, embedded in the worlds that surround us? These are no less than life’s existential questions floating implicitly in space, framed by sparsely employed spherical sounds. The gaunt body of the creature once revolved like a fetus in “mother space”—a connection that has been long forfeited. The nourishing umbilical cord has turned into a silken thread.
In the field of science fiction, an old adage says that the narrative threads spun there always reflect our present and are never really about the future. The little man has a telescope standing ready for reconnaissance. In the end, mother earth appears; closer than one thinks. (Sandra Schäfer)

A latex figure from a distant planet in the far expanses of the universe; raving, hungry, and trapped in an inner monologue. Shadab Shayegan designs an impressively profound reflection on loneliness, loss, and mania with minimalist drawings and bizarre puppet animations: amnesia as a metaphor for the futile search for answers to life´s existentialist questions. (Diagonale 2018)