The fundamental condition of our existence is to revolve. A man's very existence depends on this movement -- revolution in the atoms, structural stones of his body, movement of his blood etc. However, all of these are natural, unconscious...

    The Mevlevi Order is a Sufi order in  Turkey founded by the followers of Rumi, a 13th-century Persian poet, Islamic theologian and Sufi mystic. great philosopher and mystic of Islam, Rumi, whose doctrine advocates unlimited tolerance, positive reasoning, goodness, charity and awareness through love. His philosophy is encapsulated in one of his poems: 

Come come whoever you are 
Whether you are a non-believer, 
Whether you worship fire or an idol, 
Whether you have repented a hundred times, 
Whether you have broken a vow of repentance a hundred times, 
This is not a vow of desperation; 
Come however you are.

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    The Mevlevi are also known as the Whirling Dervishes due to their famous practice of whirling as a form of dhikr (remembrance of God). Dervish is a common term for an initiate of the Sufi path; the whirling is part of the formal ceremony.

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   To become a Dervish, one must take a vow of poverty and live in monastic conditions, pushing the physical boundaries of the body, spinning continuously for hours to go through phases of understanding and acceptance of vulnerability of our existence and the strength that comes with the acceptance of it, freeing the soul of its burdens.. 

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    This piece takes its own spin to go back to and connect with my previous work; Give and Take which is a short film capturing the solitude performance of a whirling dervish on a gentrification site in Istanbul. It brings the performance into the space with the absence but the representation of the body. It also takes an immersive spin with the kinetics of the piece, the whirl of the skirt creating a gentle breeze as well as a subtle chime of the chain hidden within the hem stitch of the skirt.

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