Luna Park

The work is an immersive, interactive reconstruction of a parking lot once shared between a prison and an amusement park in the Evin neighborhood of Tehran, Iran, during the 1980s. Addressing the absence of data from this decade, the project digitally reconstructs the parking area based on data available from six other decades, spanning from the 1960s to the 2020s—covering the period before it became a parking lot and after its dismantling for highway construction in 2007. To trace the missing decade, the player moves through time and space in a VR experience, shifting between these reconstructed periods.

Using a first-person immersive experience through VR, the work reflects on the park’s last remaining structure, the House of Future: Cinema 2000, now as haunted and broken as the future itself. That promised “future” was simply rides in the present elsewhere in the world: America. In this project, that promised journey toward 2000 reappears by looping backward like an amusement ride, moving in reverse from America to Iran, from the First World to the Third, revealing the future once again as the present elsewhere in the world.