Becoming
We find out who we are two ways.
By reading ourselves. And by who turns up.
First, we read ourselves.
Every so often we do to Charshanbe what we’d do to a client. Same six forms, same two weeks of looking, nobody paying. This is the most recent one.
01
What had drifted
We were leading with a philosophy. People arrived with a condition — something that had stopped working — and we answered with a worldview. Both true, and only one of them was what they came for.
02
What we changed
We put the condition first. Growth creates drift; what you mean stops being what people experience. The philosophy is still underneath, where it belongs. It’s no longer the opening sentence.
03
What we’re still watching
Whether the six forms hold up in other people’s systems, or whether everyone we meet turns out to have a seventh.
How it holds together
Small at the centre, open at the edge.
The core
Three of us, named below. We take the commissions, and whatever ships has one of our names on it.
The people we bring in
Developers, builders, makers, translators, boat captains. Brought in for the work they’re right for, and named on it.
The people who gather
Anyone pulled by the same questions. They turn up in the writing, in the self-initiated work, and sometimes in a room.
Who holds it
Three of us.
You're hiring these people. Whoever else comes in, the work stays with us.
Ali Maghsoodi
Holds the reading. Runs the First Readings and writes most of what’s here.
Sean Nayeri
Holds the ecology. The one who asks what else is in the room besides the client.
Guillaume Auriffeuille
Holds what gets built. Turns a decision into something that actually runs.
Where we are
Honolulu, USA, and elsewhere
The name
Charshanbe means Wednesday in Persian. The middle of the week. On the last Wednesday of the year, people light fires and jump over them.
This is the spirit we bring to it:
Threshold
Fire
The intelligence of becoming
A quiet threshold — past the rush of beginnings, before the weight of endings. A space where momentum moves, yet nothing is fully formed.
The other half
We don’t become anything alone.
Almost everything here came from someone we didn’t plan for. Hassan wasn’t a hire — he was a fisherman who offered us a boat. Theogenica exists because someone wouldn’t drop a question. Charshanbe is shaped by whoever turns up and stays, which means the studio is never quite the thing it was last year.
The people who change us have three things in common.
They’re pulled by something before they can justify it.
They’d rather be in the room than advise from outside it.
They can sit with something unresolved without needing to close it.