Dilan Perişan is a Kurdish multidisciplinary artist based in Bologna, working across sculpture, installation, and material research. Her practice develops speculative archaeologies in which contemporary residues become evidence of alternative temporalities, relationalities, and histories. Grounded in new materialist thought and informed by the Alevi understanding of can ,a shared breath or vitality across beings, she approaches matter not as passive material, but as something capable of carrying, transforming, and unsettling memory.

Perişan works with discarded and residual materials: packaging, medical remnants, food traces, hair, dried plants, wax, plaster, clay, salt, and domestic fragments. Through gestures of gathering, drying, binding, stitching, sealing, and recombining, these elements become relics, ex-votos, samples, or archaeological findings. Her forms often remain between body and object, care and collapse, protection and leakage, human and non-human. They appear preserved yet contaminated, wounded yet cared for, as if belonging both to an intimate ritual and to a future excavation.

By treating present-day debris as unstable strata of what is yet to be excavated, Perişan reveals the ecological, bodily, and political relations that ordinary objects usually conceal. Her work refuses clear separations between subject and object, sacred and ordinary, body and environment. Instead, it proposes a porous field of coexistence, where the self is not closed or singular, but formed through entanglements with materials, memories, environments, and non-human presences. Imagination becomes not an escape from reality, but a material force through which residues generate alternative memories, unstable histories, and possible futures.