I have always believed that art is not there to solely decorate our realities. It can be there to challenge it, to haunt it, to rehumanise it. At its best, art holds memory where institutions fail, gives shape to voices history has tried to erase, and creates spaces where people may once again feel seen with dignity and complexity. This belief has guided an important segment of my work – across film, music and visual art, and perhaps nowhere more clearly than in helping produce the first Kyrgyz Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.
That project mattered to me not only as a historic cultural moment, but because it answered a deeper need: the need to create visibility where there had been absence. For many communities, particularly those often treated as peripheral by the dominant art world, representation is never neutral. To create a platform is already a political act. To insist on nuance, poetry and self-definition is an act of resistance.
The Kyrgyz Pavilion was, for me, about making room – for another story, another rhythm of thought, another cultural imagination to appear on its own terms within one of the world’s most symbolically charged art spaces. In a global environment where narratives are filtered through power, marketability and hierarchy, simply opening that space felt essential. It reminded me that art can still act as a form of restoration: not correcting history, but rebalancing presence.
That same impulse runs through PATH, my documentary feature film project from our creative collective We R The Nomads.
PATH was born from a desire to explore inner and collective movement at once: how people carry memory, displacement, fracture and hope across landscapes and generations. I am drawn to what survives through passage, what remains when identities are interrupted and inherited narratives become unstable. In that sense, PATH is not only a title, but a philosophy. A path can be chosen, inherited, lost or imagined. It is always both intimate and political.
What interests me deeply is how art and film create pathways where none seem visible. A work of art cannot stop violence or resolve injustice on its own. But it can open emotional ground that makes change possible. Makes reconsidering a perspective possible. It can reawaken sensitivity in a culture that has become numb. It can invite encounters and perception where there has been separation. And it can remind us that human beings are more than the roles history assigns them.
This is especially important to me as an artist working across borders and disciplines. The most vital gestures often happen in the in-between on the borderlines: between cinema and installation, between music and memory, between documentary and dream. I do not see art as a fixed object, but as a living field of relations: between people, images, histories, sounds and possible futures.
That is also why I care about creating events, not only finished works. A meaningful cultural event can become a temporary community. It gathers people around a shared vibration, a shared question, a shared moment of attention. In an atomised world, that matters. It matters to create spaces where art is not consumed passively, but experienced as presence and exchange. It is a huge opportunity for films to create impact beyond what they could have done experienced in isolation.
If PATH carries hope, it is not naïve hope. It is rooted in movement and in the belief that art can shift perception, and that perception is where change begins. Real change rarely starts as policy. It begins earlier: in imagination, in empathy, in the moment someone recognises themselves or another differently. To make art is to refuse disappearance. To insist that stories and sensibilities pushed to the margins still contain light, intelligence and consequence. The task is not only to represent the world, but to reopen it. And perhaps that is why I continue to create. To build paths through image, sound and form where new encounters can happen, and where culture may still help us become more human to one another.
Firouz FarmanFarmaian born in 1973 in Tehran, Iran, is a contemporary artist, author, composer, and cultural producer based between the South of France and Essaouira, Morocco. As a Cultural Ambassador of the Kyrgyz Republic (2021-2023) and co-founder of We R The Nomads Agency, he bridges dialogues between cultures. His work includes the installation Gates of Turan at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022) and ongoing project Shiraz 77 (2021-2025). Firouz is also a musician with several gold-certified albums, composed the soundtrack for his docu-film PATH ( We R The Nomads Agency, 2025) with post-rock ensemble FORRM, and is currently developing a new feature film, Season of the Witch. His artistic practice spans visual arts, film, music, and technology, exploring themes of transformation and cultural dialogue.
