Rah Eleh
Prompt: Technofetishism, 2025
TRT: 07:32



Prompt: Technofetishism (2025) weaves together interviews, panels, and performances that meditate on the tensions between high-tech and ancestral technologies. This video begins with the opening question to the panel and interviewees: “Is the vision of the future anchored in colonial, Eurocentric, and Western fetishism of progress and technology?” The video then pairs my grandmother and me performing a Zoroastrian purification ritual to ward off the evil eye.

My grandmother uses an incense burner and stove to generate smoke, while I use my cellphone to create a digital simulation of fire and smoke, performing the same ritual. This juxtaposition resists the “primitivist” framing often imposed on ancestral practices, collapsing the hierarchy between tradition and modernity by pairing technologies like cameras, digital effects, and Zoom with oral tradition and ancient rituals.