This collaborative project is built around a fiction of reciprocities, taking the form of three letters and three visual responses. A curse has been cast upon our land, which is allegedly the source of our sociopolitical problems. The unfamiliar origin of this spell adds to the confusion and uncertainty it brings.
The project’s three letters are written by Rana, each a plea to lift the curse, and the three video responses come from Mana, who assumes the role of a witch. Each visual guide is a manual for breaking the curse.
In this story, magic is imagined as a force similar to prophetic miracles, yet one that resides in the hands of the people. It grants a sense of agency that has long been withheld. In societies where dominant authorities control narratives, practicing magic through rituals and storytelling becomes an unsettling source of anxiety for those in power. These tools threaten to expose the cracks in hegemony, especially when certain beliefs (magic) restore a sense of agency to marginalized groups.
A Cursebreaker for Healing Woes also questions how magical agents, such as water and riverbeds, are affected by ecocide.
Magic appears when a connection is formed between entities. It is a force in the space between beings, creating a liminal zone between “me” and “you,” a space of mutual recognition where different trajectories converge through sensory perception. At the same time, because belief in magic and witchcraft often arises during periods of uncertainty and despair, it becomes a form of hope.
A black fire has been burning inside me, for a long time now. Something has lodged in my throat, twisted my hands into knots. I’m exhausted. I see life glimmer around me, in the sunlight, in my mother’s smile, in the hair of young girls, but not within me. I don’t know how to stand. Time and again, I’m dragged into whirlpools, compressed between layers upon layers of darkness folding over each other. The noise of cars and clatter of footsteps spiral through the shrieking wind, within tall walls. I’m trapped within my own bones, twisting, turning, unable to find my way out. Heavy, as if I carry stones in my pockets. In a dream, I gathered them from a dry riverbed—each one in memory of a lost loved one.
Put out this fire. It feels like a knot hurled into my body from the outside. Its darkness flares with rage and greed, choking light.
Tears are salty, like the sea. The wind carries voices. How do you know which one to listen to?
Something tremors inside me. A lizard crawls slowly through my veins. My eyes are wide open, but I can’t tell where in time they’re looking.
You spoke of flowing water. Not long ago, I dreamed again. I had placed my feet in a river. The water was cold, light, and clear beneath the sunlight, which broke into thousands of colorful fragments. Something brushed against my foot. By the time I came to realize, it was already gone. It was heavy and felt warmer than the snow of the mountains. Since that moment, the tremor has not left me. It was as if its knot became undone and then coiled itself around my feet, then around my chest, and my throat. A narrow, skin-colored strip of endless fabric. It burned my skin with red words—words I couldn’t read and whose sound I didn’t know. Was it a dream, or did it truly happen?
Since then, it feels as if I’m walking through water. My feet move with difficulty and my heart isn’t in anything. You call it a shroud … Maybe it is, but I don’t want to see it as the end, not yet.
Maybe I’m still dreaming. Sometimes it feels as if I’m constantly running, yet nothing changes around me. As if I’m standing still in one place. The wind wraps around my body and fills my head with smoke. All I can do is look. I see the green of the trees, an amber light flickers through their leaves.
I sat beneath a walnut tree, and as I inhaled the scent of its leaves, I remembered. I used to press my ear to the trunk of a poplar, listening to the wind thread itself through its branches. It was like gazing into the eyes of the sun’s daughter, in the rain, in the schoolyard. Or like holding hands I knew could understand one another; the current in their veins overflowing into mine, and a story—or maybe affection—flowing from me to the tree. Or like the tangerine trees of Sari, whose roots stretched deep into the earth, all the way to Shiraz, to hands far from mine but connected through the roots beneath the soil.
There is something in the branches, in the roots of trees, that also runs beneath the skin of humans. I know you’ve felt it too. If I can find it again and tune myself to it … maybe, just maybe, I could rise from this heaviness. I don’t know …
Now that no river remains to wash away the spell, what then? Maybe we just need to hold each other’s hands, and whisper a prayer for rain.
Translated by Golnar Narimani
Rana Severi, Mana Tashakorinia, “A Cursebreaker for Healing Woes,” in mohit.art NOTES #16 (June/July/August 2025); published on www.mohit.art, May 31, 2025.
Header image: Mana Tashakorinia and Rana Severi, Manual Number 1, 2025. Video, 3’:47”. Still image. Courtesy of Mana Tashakorinia and Rana Severi.
