Farkhondeh Shahroudi works across media, connecting arts, crafts, and poetry, while challenging the separation between tradition and technology. For Echos der Bruderländer, Shahroudi departs from Bozorg Alavi’s Persisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch [Persian-German dictionary] to write poetry that traverses languages, histories, and generations. Writer and literary scholar Bozorg Alavi (1904–1997) emigrated from Tehran to East Berlin in 1953 as a political refugee, founding the Centre for Iranian Studies at Humboldt University in East Berlin, where he taught modern Persian literature and culture. Alavi’s dictionary was published in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1965 and remains in circulation throughout Germany to this day.

Shahroudi’s selection of words from Alavi’s dictionary for her own work creates moments for reading and listening, and can be conceived as a poetic transaction that builds bridges between words in different languages from one time and world to another.