What futures become imaginable when we bring celestial and more than human memory holders into the picture?

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The Memory Spiral is a multi-disciplinary body of work that moves like wind and water, carrying creatures from lore across South Asian and Islamic traditions, knowledge holders and dispersers such as fungi and mycelial networks and the many more than human kin who populate these worlds such as abalone and coral, seashells and snakes, toads at the threshold.

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The work moves with beings from lore such as the pari, peripatetic airborne creatures from the Persian and South Asian traditions that predate the English translation of "fairy" imposed on them, moving between worlds. The Zoba'ah encompasses a djinn within its whirlwind, the Ifrit djinn as embodied storms and whirlwinds of fire, the Marid is the oceanic djinn remembering all those who waded, those who drowned, those who arrived. The apsaras greet us gently suspended between land and water, the Sanskrit root of their name suspended between water and flow.

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In the framework of Islamic natural philosophy, the chain of being that runs from minerals through plants through animals through humans toward God, each occupying a distinct position at the threshold zones: the intermediate places that belong simultaneously to two levels of being, the twilight zones where forms exist that cannot be classified without assigning them to multiple categories. The mycelial network between minerals, plants and trees, the djinn sit between the earthly, the infernal and the celestial.

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The Memory Spiral is assembling these specific beings understood as the permeable points in the chain, the places where the visible world opens onto the generative layer underneath it. That layer is called al-ghayb (the unseen) which in this tradition is a precise ontological claim: a domain that is real yet structurally inaccessible to ordinary perception. The ruhaaniyyat, the spiritual powers whose actions are apparent whereas their essences are concealed are the agents of this hidden dimension. They are known only through their effects on visible matter.

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Throughout the series, structures decay into fluidity and photographs atomize at their own edges, honoring how porous memory and knowledge truly are, the images keep metamorphosing, corroding, unbecoming and reconfiguring. It is the surface that records their effects. The work arrives as an Aeolian landform arrives, shaped by repeated, patient, directional pressure. Buffeted from gusts of research, grief, childhood folktale and ancestral encounter, the images have been worn into their current forms the way sandstone is worn, by what moves through them, by the invisible forces that leave their signatures on visible matter.

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The body of work developed through unearthing elemental folklore from childhood as well as research into winds, both worldly and cosmic, their lore and physics, into bodies of water that hold their own knowledge systems, and into earthen mounds alive with networks of memory. The research deepened into the physics of wind, its turbulence, its laminar flows and into the mycorrhizal networks that move nutrients and signal between trees in languages older than language. These are systems of distributed knowledge, memory held collectively, intelligence that operates through connection. They became the logic of the series itself: no single image contains the work, the work lives in the relations between images, in the passage between frames.

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All these entangled realms are rendered through an enchanted world-building, inviting awe and asking us to remember the buried knowledge, the ancestral beings, guardians and more than human creatures we are held by and all those we are called to revere and tend to in return. Re-enchantment is an attentiveness to what has always been present but required a different perceptual posture to encounter. The series asks whether image-making can become an instrument sensitive enough to register such effects rather than only the surfaces that carry them.

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The Memory Spiral moves through de-growth: shape-shifting, dissolving, un-becoming, atomizing. To de-grow in this sense is to remember what was buried under the weight of disenchantment, the beings that preceded the taxonomies, the knowledge that is embodied, the glimmering thresholds that are against borders/borderization. To tend to these beings: apsaras suspended between water and flow, djinn at the threshold between earthly and celestial is an extension of tending to the living systems we share this planet with. It is the same gesture: learning to perceive the generative layer beneath the visible. The making of the work has itself been ecological: photographic surfaces allowed to corrode and reconfigure, structures softened into fluidity. This is a rendering of how memory actually behaves with its porousness and mutability, held more reliably by bodies and landscape and the lore embedded in them.

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The Memory Spiral is constantly re-assembling. Like a wind-built landform emerging from the fog, like a mycelial network extending through dark soil, it does not have a final form. It slows down. It responds. It remembers what it is told and holds it in the manner particular to its nature.