Through multi-layers and within different languages, TACENDA explores wording of the “wound”to reflect on language, translation, abstraction, history and truth, in relation to the filmmaking as a material.

TACENDA establishes a dialogue with Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma, to reflect on its concern with the “image” and human condition, with Palestine and Kurdistan in its core attention.

Meysami uses recordings of her own voice, as a five year old child—learning English alphabet in her native Iran— to point out to different temporal perspective while positioning itself in the liminal space between “then and now”.

The point of departure in  “TACENDA” is the poem And I–the child of “gorg-o-meesh”! by Ehsan Tabari, the Iranian poet, written in 1981 short before being arrested by the state police.

In Persian, “gorg-o-meesh” literally means “wolf-and-sheep”, but it also connotes “twilight”; as in that light a wolf is not distinguishable from a sheep and vice versa.

In the poem And I–the child of “gorg-o-meesh” !    Tabari quotes a line in Latin from the epic poem Aeneid, by the Roman poet Virgil:

tacitum vivit sub pectore vulnus

[a wound silently lives deep within the chest].

Tabari refers to Virgil’s words on wound, to depict his own wound. The aging poet—in the aftermath of the 1979 Iranian revolution—by calling himself the child of “wolf-and-sheep”, dialectically describes himself as a child of two things of high contrast that can’t go together. While in the sense of “twilight”, he refers to himself as belonging to a state of “in between”; on one hand, hoping to see traces of light, and on the other hand finding himself in the heart of darkness and despair.

Tacitum and Tacenda are sharing the same roots: silence, secret.

TACENDA is a word for things that shouldn’t be mentioned. A silent wound can be interpreted as what has remained of a collective memory-trauma, covertly landing on the shoulder of an individual; hiding under one’s skin, living deep within one’s heart. A silent wound, can be remnants of a chronic wound, which might be faded through time, but is never erased; it might be hidden, but is always present. A silent wound is a dormant volcano; once becoming active, it can erupt any minute.