From 13 September till 3 November, Breda will host the 11th edition of the biennial BredaPhoto Festival, the largest photographic exhibition in the Benelux. Side by side with young talents, top photographers will show their views on festival theme Journeys in industrial buildings, churches, residential houses, parks and the rugged development area ’t Zoet.
Dutch Design Daily highlights a number of Dutch participants during the festival period. Today: Tina Farifteh and her video-installation ‘When I Saw the Sun and the Moon at the Same Time’.
Tina Farifteh is a visual artist who came to the Netherlands from Tehran at the age of thirteen. She graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2021 with her project ‘The Flood’, which won several prizes, including the Royal Academy Bachelor Award. Her documentary ‘Kitten or Refugee?’ was awarded the first prize in the storytelling category at the Zilveren Camera awards in 2024. Farifteh moved to Sexbierum because she could no longer find affordable housing in Amsterdam. Her friends returned to their hometowns: Voorburg, Sint-Michielsgestel and Krimpen aan de Lek but she could not go back to Tehran. Tina: “If your way back home is cut off, you might as well go to a random place with a nice name and a beautiful view.”
‘When I Saw the Sun and the Moon at the Same Time’ is a 24-hour journey along the Seedyk (sea dyke) in Friesland in 24 minutes. Tina Farifteh developed the impressive video-installation specially for BredaPhoto. It is part of ‘Tina in Sexbierum’, a transmedia project about displacement, detachment and the simultaneous desire for a home and inability to feel at home in a society that continuously rejects you. The project has been produced by the storytelling production agency Prospektor.
“I fled. Not for the first time. But now I feel it. I recently moved to Sexbierum. A small village in Friesland. Everyone asks why. I’m still looking for an answer.
Every day I climb the Seedyk. I climb straight up. I look at the sea. I look at the sky. Infinite variations in colour and texture. I see how almost all borders disappear. How the horizon remains as the only border. Between heaven and earth.
One day I saw the sun and the moon at the same time. The sun sank slowly into the sea and the moon rose behind the fields. A majestic and grandiose piece of theatre that takes place every day but which had always escaped me. The sun, the moon, the dike, the Wadden Sea and the sky. Ebb and flow. The fields. A beauty more wondrous and true than any man-made system. I am part of this perfect equilibrium. I feel it, here on the dike, between the sun and the moon. I am home. I was always home. If society does not provide a home, is there a place in the landscape for the displaced?”
