SARAB is a collective created in 2018 by Nahid Rezashateri and Gianluca Ceccarini that deals with photographic projects, visual anthropology, self publishing, video art an graphic design, with a particular interest in the themes of identity, memory and landscape as a cultural process.
SARAB Collective is also a Magazine, where we share the projects of authors from all over the world, and an Independent Label that wants to promote the work of artists and photographers by offering editorial services such as editing, graphics, printing, handmade binding and advertising for fanzines, photo books and artist's books.
Sarab Collective: sarabcollective.com
Instagram: @sarab_collective
Nahid Rezashateri
I studied at the School of Art and then Graphic Design at the University of Sharood in Iran. I did an internship at the Cultural Association Kadre Sefid and designed books for children. I worked in an Iranian newspaper and an advertising magazine as a Grafic Designer. Also
in Iran, I was the director of an artistic collective of the Sharood Cultural Office that was involved in the design of short films and animations: from this experience the two animations and Adamha va Kalaghka were born.
In Theran I specialized and worked in the field of theater and cinema make-up. In 2012 I moved to Italy and I studied Media Art at the Accademia di Frosinone. In the last years my interests have focused on photography and video art.
In 2018 I founded the collective SARAB with Gianluca Ceccarini.
Instagram: @nahid_rezashateri
Gianluca Ceccarini
I studied Cultural Anthropology and in all the field research I've always used the camera because I am convinced that images have the strength to tell the complexity of reality often more than words.
The images are semantic containers, the photos are always dense structures of meaning. During my studies I became interested in documentary photography fascinated by the ethnographic photographs of the great anthropologists who documented ethnic minorities
and tribal societies. Later I discovered and studied contemporary research photography and in particular the diaristic and intimate form. With Nahid Rezashateri, an iranian photographer, in 2018 I founded the collective SARAB.
Instagram: @ceccarini_gianluca
Project for TERRAROSSALAB
SARAB, identity mirages in contemporary Persia
The Iranian landscape consists mainly of a vast desert territory. As for the Inuit who have so many words to indicate snow, so the Iranians use different terms for the various types of desert: Kavir, Sahra, Biaban, Dasht kavir.
Along the roads that cross the desert areas it is common to see in the distance what the Iranians call sarab: the mirages.
During our journey in the Iranian hinterland we thought about the recent history of the Persian people, its continuous and complex work in search of its identity and the frequency with which everything can seem illusory just like a sarab in the desert.
A millennial culture, rich and refined, formed on a vast desert territory crossed by large commercial routes for caravans.
A complex and multifaceted contemporary society, full of contrasts, where tradition and modernity coexist painfully.
It is often to the great Persian Zoroastrian before the Arab occupation that the Iranians turn in their continuous search for origins and identity, a distant and evanescent period like a sarab in the desert.
