Early in 2020, Elyas Alavi found a line from one of his poems painted on streets across Tehran, picked up by the community as a rallying cry. Translated from Farsi to English it reads,

As you draw water from a well
and make tea with that water,
doesn't it taste of blood?

The short poem speaks to the toll of war on the individual and—hearing about it from friends then seeing images online—Alavi felt a sense of giving up ownership over his words to the people, an experience intensified by the recent banning of his books by the Iranian government. Although the words were erased from the streets by the authorities, some marks remain. Here, the neon embodies the spirit of the graffiti; holding both the fragility of the human breath and the power of language to speak truths.

Shown as part of fine print’s FIELD NOTES, Sauerbier House, 8 May—19 June 2021.