Sonia Sagan
Café Ham-Saayeh // The REAL Tragedy of the Commons

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The large cardboard carpet around which crocheted wool cushions are placed in the room creates an inviting effect. At first glance, the carpet seems to be decorated with ornaments, but a closer look reveals a variety of motifs from soil and underground. Shoe prints, fauna, cobblestones and various signs of manholes can be made out on the carpet. The signs refer to Berlin’s underground infrastructure, to the networks of water, gas, electricity and sewage. In addition, influences from Persian culture are combined with traces of memes, political slogans and online life on the carpet’s surface.

Sonia Sagan used a DIY-built portable desktop laser to produce stencils and applications from recycled materials, the punched-out shapes of which were then plastered and glued onto the carpet in a second step. In this way, the traditional process of manual carpet weaving as part of a nomadic life is transformed into a process that draws on materials of urban life, modern logistics and the fast paced digital attention economy. Sitting on cushions handmade from upcycled materials, the carpet can be contemplated.

The carpet is one of the results of Sagan’s artistic research. As a place to dwell and exchange, it is representative of the role that coffee houses have played – and can play again in the future – in the process of social democratisation. The coffeehouse Café Naderi in Tehran, for example, was a place where the political and cultural avant-garde met before the Islamic revolution. In Enlightenment Europe, the coffee house was a space that contributed to the structural transformation of the public sphere in Habermas‘ sense, where writing, reading and discussion took place. In Habermas‘ understanding, the public sphere can have the function of democratising society in an Enlightenment-rational manner.

Based on these findings, Sagan developed the multidisciplinary art project Café Ham-Saayeh, a coffee house for the future and part of common needs. Here, local food and drink shall be offered, accessibility to space and training opportunities shall be given to all and exchange with neighbours shall be made possible. In the conceptualised coffee houses, which are to be found in every neighbourhood and which are oriented towards local cultural characteristics, a new understanding of urban life is to be made possible and new political ideas are to be exchanged. In this way, the imagined coffee house is a counter-model to current, globally operating coffee house chains. Its deep local roots are also evident in the sourcing of goods: Plants and mushrooms are grown on the roof to avoid waste. The name of the café „Ham Saayeh“ means „neighbour“ in Farsi and in the literal translation: „We stand in the same shadow“. Sagan takes this meaning further for the installation: „We stand in the shadow of the same oppressor“.

Text: Dr. Silke Förschler

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Sonia Sagan

Sonia Sagan is an artist/prophet/poet based in Stockholm. Sagan works beyond medium specificity, producing the lived research project and gesamtkunstwerk “ATAR Walk With Me” or “the ATARi-faith” (2020-2030). Utilizing immersive installations, choreographed performances, sound, and text as narrative devices, Sagan’s work reimagines landscapes of overlapping crises, excesses and collision courses defining our zeitgeist as seen through a mythological lens. The origin story and practices of the fictitious “ATARi-faith” intertwines ancient Zoroastrian sources with cutting-edge online discourse, to craft a metaphysical system for future urban dwellers united by precarity.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/posthumansmokemachine