concept
VeloEast
an art project by Shahin Tivay Sadatolhosseini & Dr. Anke Scharrahs
By wooden bicycle on a tree trail from Aachen (Germany) to Tehran (Iran)
We – a well-traveled artist and a wood restorer/conservator – are going for a long-distance trip in 2025/26 by wooden bicycle from Aachen (Germany) to Tehran (Iran), which will also be an art project of ecological dimensions.
Shahin – photographer, designer, choreographer, film maker and gym wheel acrobat – walked 5,826 km from his hometown of Aachen to his native city of Tehran in 2015 to 2017 with his project RollEast, rolling his 2-meter-high gym wheel in front of him. As his special travel vehicle, the Gym wheel was also the main protagonist of his artistic practice (photography, film).
Now we will travel the route on wooden bicycles and take the Gym wheel with us on a trailer. In this way, ten years after Shahin's first journey, the wheel will come to Tehran for an exhibition. Along the way, we will plant a tree every 6.5 km - an ancient Persian measure of length (the parsakh) and the distance of precisely 1,000 rolls of the gym wheel - for which we will find sponsors and local tree seedling guardians, thus creating an internationally sustainable avenue of trees as well as a network of people and trees, stretching about 5,600 km. We will plant 888 trees of which each will cost 88 EUR. Any additional donations will be used to create and plant a classic Persian garden - a bustan - in Iran. Our project will be divided into two sections of four months each, so that we can plant the trees in the spring and autumn months to ensure the seedlings grow.
Through this multifaceted project, we would like to draw further attention to the issues of climate change, ecology and sustainability, and build bridges between countries, people and cultures. It is important to us not just to plant trees, but also to plant ideas and develop proactive networks that are both local and global.
The Gym wheel will once again be the protagonist of Shahin's photographic art and can be seen in the changing landscapes, seasons and locations. But Shahin will also capture the encounters with people on the road with his camera.
The entire travel and art project will be filmed using professional camera technology. The result will be an extraordinary road movie with special vehicles, protagonists and encounters.