Feature

Rouzbeh Shadpey is an artist, musician, and writer with a doctorate in medicine and inexhaustible exhaustion. He currently resides in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.

Gossip, as “unverified” information, has complex relations to power. As a historically maligned oral tradition, with gendered roots, it asks that we question our sources—who we trust and why—as well as who has been afforded belief or legitimization over others. In this issue, gossip takes various forms, from a mode of subversion under settler-colonial states to speculative fiction; it is revealed in the archives, in silence, and in its failures to resist authoritarian imaginings or institutional exploitation. After all, why do we gossip?


Gossip

Memory

Medicine

History

Using the medical diagnostic tool of the memory test, Rouzbeh Shadpey poetically reflects on how the divides between Palestinian realities and German state narratives, and between lived collective memory and official History, informed engagements with documenta fifteen.


Header

C Mag

Rouzbeh Shadpey

The Injunction to Forget: documenta fifteen and the Test of Memory