Portal Fire

Portal Fire is a story born of a desire to see future-facing/speculative narratives and queer representation in graphic arts media depicting Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) cultures outside of an Orientalist lens. It is a tale of blurred boundaries, false borders, and questions of cross-cultural coexistence.

Portal Fire takes form as an immersive narrative experience supplementing a graphic novel with handcrafted objects, audio, film and performance. Hospitality, craft, music, divination and storytelling are made tangible as they are essential components in SWANA cultural heritage and therefore play a prominent role in this narrative.

Once There Was and Once There Was Not

Fall 2019

Three vignettes provide a view into scenes across space and time from the forthcoming graphic novel Portal Fire: a weaver’s workshop, a living room and a museum exhibit 1,000 years into the future.

Here, archaeologists have unearthed artifacts from the past, speculating, often erroneously, about the use, meaning and implications of what they have found. The artifacts themselves are remnants of the daily life around Maro, a young non-binary orphan and weaver’s apprentice before they set out on a life changing journey.

Vignette 1: Artifacts with didactic labels; various materials.

Vignette 2: The weaver’s workshop where Maro apprentices.

Vignette 3: Maro’s grandmother’s living room & hosting space.

Models: Cyrah Dardas, Reuben Telushkin, Zainab Ali Syed