Azade Shahmiri: You and I Have Seen the Garden from That Cold Sullen Crack – Sophiensæle | Independent Theater in Berlin

Azade Shahmiri: You and I Have Seen the Garden from That Cold Sullen Crack

A large video projection shows the silhouette of a person moving in a courtyard or garden. Beams of light shine down from above through stage haze, creating visible rays over the projection.
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In her research-based cinematic performance, Azade Shahmiri, theater and performance artist, revisits the garden as a Living Archive of collective resistance within transformative moments of Iranian society. Wandering around the invisible or documented, repurposed or erased gardens, You and I Have Seen the Garden from That Cold Sullen Crack reclaims the peripheries, reassembling the ruptured narratives buried beneath vegetation and soil, flowing through dying water channels—qanats. It maps and tracks the layered agency and performativity of gardens by interweaving visual archives, found footage, and soundscapes with woman-to-woman letters, fragmented biographies, the performer’s ambivalent presence, and a self-reflective voice.

Gardens, bound to land and labor, remain contested. The performance, likewise unfinished and growing, stands as testimony to internal struggles and to Western interventions and orientalist framings embedded within and through them—grounds of grief and loss, and of resilience and hope.

Evening information

Ticket

The information on accessibility is still in progress and will be updated as soon as possible. If any questions remain unanswered until then, please feel free to contact the communication department at barrierefreiheit@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 35. Please note that details may change by the day of the event. Therefore, if you find out after you have purchased your ticket that the performance is no longer accessible to you, you can contact us for a ticket return at ticketing@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 45 until 5 business days after the event (Monday through Friday between 10am and 6pm).

The information on accessibility is still in progress and will be updated as soon as possible. If any questions remain unanswered until then, please feel free to contact the communication department at barrierefreiheit@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 35. Please note that details may change by the day of the event. Therefore, if you find out after you have purchased your ticket that the performance is no longer accessible to you, you can contact us for a ticket return at ticketing@sophiensaele.com or 030 27 89 00 45 until 5 business days after the event (Monday through Friday between 10am and 6pm).

Duration

  • Approx. 60 minutes without intermission

Language

  • Spoken Language in English and Farsi with subtitles in German, English, and Farsi.

Lighting

  • Rather dark athmosphere

Sound

  • rather quet athmosphere
  • the performer sits in the audience and speaks from there through a microphone

Other

  • Projections of a film on gauze during the whole performance

Audience

  • Seated grandstand
  • Two beanbag seats according to availability
  • Two wheelchair spaces according to availability

Early Boarding

  • Early boarding is available. An announcement will be made.
  • There is also a long admission period. Doors open ten minutes before the performance begins.

Tickets

  • Reservations can be made via the ticket telephone at 030 283 52 66, Monday to Friday from 4pm-6pm
  • Via the online ticket shop
  • At the box office

You can also find more information about accessibility at the house here.

Research, text, film, performance: Azade Shahmiri
Sound design, composition: Mahtab Sabetara
Research, dramaturgy, poster collage: Leila Ahmadi Abadeh
Subtitle operation: Bita Asadi
Documentation: Kimia Kalantari

A production by Azade Shahmiri in co-production with Festival Belluard Bollwerk. With support of Sophiensæle. Media partners: Missy Magazine, Siegessäule, taz.

The title of the performance is an excerpt from the poem Conquest of the Garden by Forugh Farrokhzad.

Azade Shahmiri (Tehran/Berlin) is a theater and performance artist, writer and researcher. Her processual practice intertwines narrative forms with personal experiences, memory, testimony, and fictional intervention. Through theater plays, lecture-performances and film essays, she explores marginalized voices embedded in documents, found materials and archives, while reflecting on layered lives within contemporary Iranian hi/stories. Azade Shamiri’s works have been presented at various theaters and festivals, such as Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Wiener Festwochen, Kaserne Basel, Belluard Bolwerk, Edinburgh Festival, Kyoto Experiment, Asian Arts Theatre Gwangju, Theater Festival of Kerala, Sophiensæle and SAVVY Contemporary. 

  • On a dark stage, a video projection shows a landscape with the silhouette of a person. Above it, several lines of text appear in English, French, and German.
    © Julie Folly
  • One person sits in a dark stage space in front of a microphone. The person’s face is illuminated by a warm spotlight while the background remains black.
    © Julie Folly
  • A large video projection shows a person in an outdoor space next to a building and trees. Fog or stage smoke drifts in from the left side across the stage and partially obscures the projection.
    © Julie Folly