Mahsa Koochak – Touchscape 3: Camping Beyond Reasoning
Reserve your ticket
Touchscape 3: Camping Beyond Reasoning offers a 1 on 1 experience for which it is necessary to book a timeslot. You can do this through the above link. The experience lasts about 30 minutes. For any questions or issues with the booking, you can send an email to mahsa.das2024@gmail.com.
"Secret of the Red Rose" by Sohrab Sepehri
Let us move the curtain aside,
letting our emotions breathe fresh air,
letting desire play freely, removing its shoes.
It is not our job to identify the secret of the red rose,
maybe our job is to dive into the magic of the red rose.
Let the excitement soar
and camp beyond the realm of reasoning.
What if we resist reasoning? How do we communicate with the world through touch? What lies behind discomfort?
Touchscape 3: Camping Beyond Reasoning is an immersive performative installation that invites you to observe your sensorial body as a performative setup.
--
by Elioa Steffen
I touch, am touched, and know its absence.
At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a moment that stretched for several months in which I could remember exactly when I had last touched another person:
Lewis Young, my new friend’s partner
21 March 2020
A strong hug, sweet, with a hint of affectionate maleness.
Loving, desperately needed, scary.
Touch is rarely (if ever) a solo act. More a concert of perceptions, touch performs alongside other senses, harmonizing and discordant in turns. I pinch my lip in concentration. Not only do I feel the rough catch of my nail, but I also smell the sweet, buttery smell of the cookies I am baking. I am joined by my mother who lets me help her make the cookies, and her perfectionism that rarely made room for my 6-year-old “help.” Not long after that, I was home alone and I ate a whole bowl of melted butter and sugar. It was sublime.
There is an air of certainty to memory that shields me from the uncertainty of touching. The material, social, and personal mix together through shared questions. What is this? Cookie batter and bond of friendship both ask the same things. How should I be? What are my desires? Am I alone in this experience or feeling or room? Where can I find what Lama Pema calls the illusion of solid ground, of sureness, of knowing what is?
A possibility for playfulness appears when I can let go of certainty. In these rare moments I can accept that nothing is solid and few things are certain. There is room for exploration of what I believe is possible and, sometimes even what might lie beyond that, a release from what I know of myself.
There is a way in which touch invites me beyond all filters into a reality of the moment. To feel in this first and last hug a need for touch. To be with the terror of a mysterious pandemic, the awareness that the stakes and intimacy of an action suddenly got much higher, the danger, the decision, whether consciously or not, to take the risk.
Touch, more than most other senses, is a momentary experience. I almost always perceive touch in binary. I can describe the sensations, but even in a touch-experience where there is change, I tend to understand it in discrete moments. The bathwater reaches halfway up the side of my body, I am fairly warm. The bathwater is covering most of my body, I am a bit too hot. The bathwater is at my neck, my legs hang over the side of the tub, I am a perfect lobster. Touch allows me no in between.
I talk about not touching others by describing the last physical interaction with a person. I speak of my mother’s foibles by remembering her love. I wonder if touch is always such a juker, like a basketball player pretending to go one way, only to go the other. No, I think it is I who calls upon misdirection when faced with the moment of contact. Reality has never been my forte and yet through touch I am offered glimpses of what might be.
Mahsa Koochak

Mahsa Koochak is an Iranian theatre and short filmmaker and director interested in the in-between, liminality, the uncanny, feelings of disgust, fear, and excitement. With curiosity and playfulness, she stages encounters confronting identity fluidity through objects. Emphasizing the therapeutic power of touch, she invites us to be with our feelings and sensations and connect with our bodies in the present moment. Her practice reflects on contradictory notions around healing and visions for a better life.
Credits
Concept: Mahsa Koochak; Installation construction: Raha Tafakori, Dariya Trubina, Mahsa Koochak; Host and artistic collaborator: Laura Boser; Tutor: Joachim Robbrecht; External advisors: Nienke Terpsma, Tchelet Pearl Weisstub; Special thanks to: Elioa Steffen