Share-e-Nau Wanderings (A Film Treatment)

Share-e Naw Wonderings (A Film Treatment) marks the beginning of Garcí­a Torres’s engagement with the histories of the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti in Afghanistan. This work (along with the later Tea, 1391) specifically traces the moment when Boetti moved to Kabul to became a hotelier at One Hotel, which he inhabited and ran until 1977.

Share-e Naw Wonderings (A Film Treatment) consists of a series of fictional faxes addressed to the deceased artist and revolves around García Torres’s fictive journey to Kabul in 2001 to find the building that once housed One Hotel. The faxes, written candidly in the first person, both discuss the mundane details of his trip, such as what he is eating and the small changes to the area, and also serve as a report on the political climate at the time in Afghanistan, a particularly charged moment, acknowledged through references to the presence of US troops and the threat of Osama Bin Laden. The work takes the form of 19 thermal paper prints, a medium known to be unstable and to return to its original colorlessness over time, giving the story a certain feel of authenticity, as the grit of the fax process is visible on the surfaces of paper, but also a limited life span as a transmittable form of narration.