I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited. _ Jorge Luis Borges
I was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1974, when the 7th Asian Games were held in Tehran. At four, when the revolution was taking place, I got addicted to LEGO, which I have not quit yet. The eight years of elementary and secondary school were my Dark Ages, overcast by the shadow of the Iran-Iraq war! During high school I apprenticed as a draughtsman. Then, it was part of the high school curriculum, which mandated attending a workplace one day a week to learn a job, skill, or craft. At about the same time, in the summer of 1988, while traveling the central Persian Plateau (Dasht-e Kavir) and visiting some remote cities and villages such as Abyaneh, Neyasar, Ardestan, and Nain, I was taken away by the magic of art and architecture; since then I am a restless soul. With these convictions, I entered the School of Architecture at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran.
In late November 1998, I was in a rush at the airport to leave on a business trip. Having a personal email address has just started to become a trend, and I needed one for my meeting in Syria. I still remember that you could check your email only at Internet cafes because having access to the Internet was difficult in Iran.
I had just a couple of minutes left to get on board, and a friend of mine was helping me get registered on Yahoo! We tried my full name in different ways like: RezaAliabadi, AliabadiReza, rezaaliabadi, raliabadi, and similar versions. We even tried it with a few symbols (-, _, /) between my first and family names, but they were all taken. That was the first time that I understood there were other people with the same name. When my friend was playing around with letters and symbols, I just wrote down my full name, kept the essentials, and got rid of all the vowels:
reza aliabadi > r_z_ _l__b_d_ > rzlbd
Under the pressure and tension of losing my flight, I had come up with a miniature version of my identity – an index of my own, which carried the essence of my ID and was unique. There might be other Reza Aliabadis but there was only one rzlbd. After about a decade, it became a pseudonym, almost my personal signature, and my sole mark.
I will never forget the day I sat behind my used-to-be desk in my used-to-be office making an exclusive list of all my used-to-be assets. I had finally decided to leave Tehran for Montreal and to do an M.Phil. degree at McGill University. The challenge was converting my whole life into two suitcases, each weighing 30 kilograms, based on the IATA regulation for overseas flights.
Though it was hard to ignore lots of beloved possessions, especially since many of them were accompanied by memories and passions, and many of them had been achieved through hard effort and struggle, it was a situation that I learned from. Surprisingly, things and priorities expose their real value in tough circumstances. One learns to do without a thing and skip unnecessary things. For almost twenty years, I have been purging my possessions constantly and trying not to add clutter to my cart. Well, as a nomad, I know nothing better than being weightless.
Before reestablishing my practice in Toronto, I had to do 5,600 hours of internship, as, in most cases, there is no reciprocity rule for licensed architects between many countries. During this rather frustrating period, I developed a habit of quitting my job once a year and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Three major solo expeditions to the North Pole, around the world in 49 days, and the Trans-Canada across the country from the Great Lakes to the Pacific influenced my perspective toward life in general and my creative practice in particular. They have struck my imagination and given me feelings that have conditioned my view of the world.
Living in a fishing boat with two Inuit “goodfellas” and floating on the vastness of the Canadian Arctic along with breathtaking icebergs, I found that a day can be half a year long and that sense of time and directions (both cardinal and magnetic) can get lost; only because one dares to dislocate oneself enough. This distorted the basic conventions and formed a philosophical foundation in me to respect the essentials, the plain, and the most important: void – where time and space become inseparable.
Hopping all around the world while crossing out a list of my favourite to-be-visited items, from Le Corbusier open-hand-monument in Chandigarh, to the Giza in Cairo, and Michelangelo’s David in Florence, I committed myself not to stay in the same city for two consecutive nights. This widened my understanding of extreme social and cultural diversities, our “lowest common multiple” and our “greatest common factor”; it also taught me to respect, adapt, and accommodate any given circumstances.
Driving the Trans Canada Highway for five days inspired me to do a photo installation that I later called Transimage. It is a multi-layered scene resulting from the superimposition of fifty photographs taken at intervals of one hundred kilometres, exactly. The superimposed illustration had created new possibilities for new readings and interpretations. This changed my perception, and I started to appreciate the capacity of overlay, merging countless visible and invisible forces.
I am still keeping up with this old habit and escaping now and then. This is very helpful to feel liberated, to have a dialogue with myself, to be away from the inertia of daily life, to reflect on my creative practice, to step back and make sure what I am doing and why I am doing it, and to begin again every time with a different dimension of awareness. This sense of beginning/becoming keeps me interested, obsessed, and passionate. It is like a love affair, and the idea is to keep falling in love with your beloved!
_RZLBD
Toronto, Canada