Ladoni [Palms], Artur Aristakisyan, Russia, 1993, 139’, b/w, 16mm blown-up to 35mm

I thank you, God
for creating me
for creating my caring mother
my kind father.
I thank you God, for creating the
flowing water and the fruiting trees.
I thank you for giving me hands
to work with.
I thank you for giving me eyes
to see the marvels of this world.
I thank you for giving me ears
To enjoy the beautiful songs.
I thank you for giving me feet
To go wherever I will.
Who is this in hell
praising you, O Lord?
Who is this in hell?
[from the voice over of The House is Black, (Khaneh siah ast), Forough Farrakhzad, 1962, 22’, b/w, 35mm]

The voice of the Iranian poetess Forough Farrakhzad spoken by the leprous kids in her film The House is Black resonates with Artur Aristakisyan’s one; they address and try to undermine the established and systemic codes of the ways in which we can see, beyond any mere social or religious form of belief. Yet, as if the proximity was decided by the films and not by their authors, Artur Aristakisyan reconstructs the memory of Farrakhzad’s work when Ladoni was already completed. 

Ladoni [Palms] was shot in 16mm between 1986 and 1990 in Kishinev, Artur Aristakisyan’s home town, and was completed in 1993 as the director’s graduation film at the VGIK in Moscow.

Walking along the streets, the director accompanies the beggars of a half destroyed Kishinev, addressing a letter to his unborn son, wrapped in his mother’s womb, flesh and bones, yet destined to die.

In their substance, the beggars give shape to the cinematographic language itself through which the film can take shape. In Ladoni, the film is the main dramatis persona, as Aristakisyan tells us in an interview. Still, that doesn’t mean that it can be bartered with an object for intellectual consumption, since there isn’t any space or time for a seductive disembodiment. There is instead the time and the space for an exposure, persistent and affective, there is a querying form of a close proximity and relation with the presence, the matter of vision.