Nazanin Noroozi
The Riptide Statement
The Riptide is a visual short story based on super 8 movies that Nazanin Noroozi's father took in post-revolution Iran. In this 4 minute film, handmade cinema is used as a medium to transform personal and public archives in order to re-create a narrative told by others addressing trauma and displacement. The mundane moments taken from kids’ school choirs, are juxtaposed with the images of glaciers melting, fictional asteroids attacking the earth, and other natural disasters to lift us beyond a singular event and represent a communal effect shared by millions in the anthropocene. The Riptide consist of over 900 individually painted frames and utilize handmade cinema using printmaking, drawing, and stop-motion animation technique as means of re-imagining history, collective memory and broken narratives. The found footage and images of forces of nature, such glacier melts, downing of the Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in 2020, and asteroids orbiting the earth are manipulated multiple times digitally and manually as a reliable spectrum to explore notions of failure, resistance, and longing. Noroozi’s interest in the archeology of technology results in borrowing elements and graphics of early computer games such as Star Wars Atari, and Battlezone arcade games; which were among the first shooting games that came out at the end of the analog era in the 1980s.