By: Dr. Fatemeh Abdollahzadeh

Etidorhpa is a ritualistic representation of the human body’s encounter with space, in a context where technology, silence, mourning, and narration are simultaneously constructing meaning. This virtual reality experience, created by Mostafa Seyed Ebrahimi, is not merely an artwork or a technological project; it is a digital ritual that redefines Shia mourning traditions, especially the Roza ceremony, transforming it from a static, collective practice into an individual, introspective, and interactive experience. Unlike traditional mourning rituals held in shared spaces under the guidance of a religious figure, in Etidorhpa, the user's body becomes the starting point for sorrow and exploration. The artist, by creating a limited and dark space, constructs walls filled with faceless figures—representing not only collective suppression but also inviting the viewer to engage with pain, silence, and denial on a personal level.

The artist’s aim is not only to reconstruct a ritual but also to critique the structures of power and silence within it. The audience is no longer a passive mourner, but one who creates mourning through their body, gaze, and movement. In this piece, the body is not a mere observer but an active agent of the narrative, and reading is not a mental activity but a bodily and environmental performance that transforms the world step by step.

In Etidorhpa, form is not ornamental but an active structure to engage the body with space. Dark spaces, faceless figures, dim light, and vague sounds are all designed to create a bodily experience of suffocation and revelation. The viewer's gaze plays as crucial a role as the movement of their hands or standing still in one place. This intelligent design turns the architecture of space into a response to the body; space opens or closes based on the user's perception, as if the language of the body is heard and answered. This form not only elevates aesthetics from the visual level to the level of action but also points to a new form of spatial design that generates experience through the body, not just through seeing or hearing.

The body in Etidorhpa is a tool for understanding space and creating meaning; space, in turn, responds to the presence of the body. From a phenomenological perspective, this work transforms our understanding of "space." Space is no longer a neutral container; it is an arena that interacts with the body. In this experience, with eyes that begin to read and hands that move through darkness, the body becomes the starting point of the narrative. The experience of space here is temporal, sensory, and dependent on presence—an aspect that aligns precisely with Martin Heidegger’s concept of "Being-in-the-world." Heidegger sees dwelling as a form of being, and in Etidorhpa, the body is not just still but a "dweller" of the experience, the place where meaning is born.

This experience can be compared to works that place the body at the center of understanding space and meaning, such as the works of Bill Viola and James Turrell. In Viola’s works, the slowness of movement and stillness of space invite the viewer to contemplate inner suffering, just as Etidorhpa transforms silence into a symbol of repression. James Turrell, with his design of luminous spaces, makes the perception of the body central to the aesthetic experience. However, what sets Etidorhpa apart is its precise and sophisticated use of technology to evoke this embodied-spatial-narrative experience. In it, the body is both the medium of perception and the agent of narrative change, a feature that is less clearly seen in many contemporary interactive arts.

by Bill Viola

by James Turrell

In Etidorhpa, what the audience sees is a reflection of what they have already experienced; something that John Berger clearly discusses in his book Ways of Seeing. Berger argues that there is no such thing as a neutral or pure gaze; seeing is learned, and every visual experience is influenced by history, culture, social class, and the viewer's personal memories. In the space of Etidorhpa, this idea takes on greater depth, as the work not only presents images but ties them to the audience’s responses.

The dark space, silent faces, suspended words—all of these elements become meaningful only when the viewer reacts to them with a mental background. For someone familiar with mourning rituals, silence, or the absence of sound within a specific cultural context, these images may evoke deeply personal memories. Berger emphasizes that meaning is created by our gaze, not just by what is seen; and Etidorhpa, with its structure based on "active looking" and "bodily engagement," recreates this view as an embodied experience.

As a result, Etidorhpa cannot be considered a work with a single meaning; rather, each viewer extracts a different narrative based on their personal experience. The technology-driven interactivity of this project provides exactly the kind of platform Berger speaks of: a world where meaning is not found in the artwork itself, but in the relationship between the viewer and it— a relationship that here is visual, bodily, and emotional.

One of Etidorhpa’s most fundamental innovations is its redefinition of narrative within the realm of virtual reality technology; a narrative that is no longer linear, fixed, or prewritten but is created momentarily and interactively, with the physical and perceptual presence of the viewer. Unlike the traditional narrative structure that relies on language and temporal sequence, this work draws from the gaze and movement of the body as components of narrative construction. The narrative no longer flows in words but is shaped in the space between text, gaze, sound, and light.

In this space, every word is like a fragment of reality that is only activated by the viewer's focused gaze; a word that does not exist before being seen and, once seen, not only forms meaning but also creates space. This reciprocal relationship between gaze and text generates a new way of reading—an active reading that is not for understanding meaning but for creating the world. Technologies such as eye and hand tracking are not just mechanical tools but become narrative elements, like the hands of a writer or the gaze of a camera guiding the narrative.

Ultimately, Etidorhpa is an experience of walking in darkness, of mourning with the body, and of breaking the silence that shadows the space. In this modern ritual, the body is not under the control of ritualistic structure but is an agent that redefines space with every movement. The faceless figures, silent at first, begin to scream with the body’s entrance; the text, suspended in silence, is only read with the gaze. This work is a digital and profound representation of a modern ritual in which technology, space, and the body engage in a philosophical dialogue: about silence, repression, and the power of embodied perception.