What Doesn’t Fit in a Suitcase?
Installation
Generative video projection, found objects, text, and audio in vintage suitcase
Vintage suitcase approx. 29 × 20 in
Vintage suitcase approx. 29 × 20 in
What Doesn’t Fit in a Suitcase? The suitcase I found was already worn down. Scuffed leather, a broken latch on one side. I kept it that way. I’ve been thinking for a while about what people actually take with them when they leave somewhere. Not the obvious things. The other things. I came here for school with two bags, and somewhere in those first months I realized that a lot of what I thought I had carried with me hadn’t really survived the distance. Not dramatically. Just slowly. Quietly. Blurred at the edges.
This installation started as a way of working through that feeling. It still feels unfinished. Maybe that’s part of it. A generative moving image, created in TouchDesigner and composited in After Effects, is projected into the suitcase. The visuals look like fire, like something detonating. Someone once asked me why it felt so aggressive, why not make something softer or more nostalgic. I didn’t really have an answer except that it felt honest. Leaving is not always gentle. Sometimes it feels violent. Sometimes grief and rupture exist beside memory and beauty at the same time.
The exhibition theme, We Were, We Are, We Will Be, stayed with me while making this. A suitcase somehow holds all three. What it once carried. What it carries now. The journey it still hasn’t taken. The work draws from Persian poetry, especially Mohammadreza Shafiei Kadkani’s lines: “If only, if only, a person could carry their homeland with them
the way violets are carried in boxes of soil…” I’ve reread those lines constantly while making this piece. The violet survives only if you carry the soil too. The roots. The part that cannot easily be separated or transported. You never get to carry just the flower.
Inside the suitcase is a handwritten Persian poem by my mother. I didn’t ask her to make it beautiful it simply became beautiful on its own. I think it might be the most honest part of the installation. The violets are still being finalized and are not yet visible in the current documentation, but they remain central to the work. I’m a second-year Graphic Design student still figuring out many things, but this is one of the first projects where I understood exactly why I needed to make it.
Video (Subtitled)
Video (Unsubtitled)
Installation image
Installation image