One Person’s Trash is another Person’s Treasure, a project by Shahram Entekhabi and Franco Marinotti (director of Fine Arts Unternehmen AG), is the first issue of a series of four magazine-like books that are published semi-annually in the period of two years. Each issue deals with two different subject areas that are closely related to the artist's work:
One Person’s Trash is another Person’s Treasure, issue 1/2008, Humour and the Modern Clown [part 1], Muscles and Masculinities [part 2]
Issue 2/2008, Private History and Relationship [part 1]/Migration and Migrating Media [part 2]
Issue 1/2009, Faith and Religion [part 1]/Orient and Occident [part 2]
Issue 2/2009, Art and Architecture [part 1]/Style and Trash [part 2].

The first issue includes texts by Kathrin Becker (head of the Video Forum in the NBK, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein), Doris Berger (art critic and curator based in Berlin) and interviews with Nat Muller (independent curator and critic, Rotterdam, The Netherlands) and Kea Wienand (art historian, Oldenburg and Trier).

Click here for audio-Interview with Shahram Entekhabi registred in occasion of the publication of the book.
Author: Johannes Bock, June 2008 www.nurart.org
The interview is only in German language.

Excerpt from the foreword of the first issue by Franco Marinotti:
I know Shahram since quite a long time both, as a friend and as an artist.
We worked together on several projects: exhibitions, fairs, films, videos, performances and I have been for him at the same time producer, gallerist and publisher. I have always been fascinated by his approach to work, simple or complex as it may have been. His very particular behaviour, even handling the most controversial socio political issues his work strongly deals with, made me amuse whilst thinking, and laugh too.
What sort of behaviour you may ask. A “performative” one, I gather, strongly driven by his humour and irony towards his work and his content. He was taking up physically through his body the entire burden of the consequences, related to the mostly quite dramatic content of his work. I was definitely loosing reference between his person and his personifications, finding myself suddenly in a sort of puppetry environment unable to identify puppets from puppeteer. The Islamic fundamentalist, the Kurdish activist, the Guerilla guy, the criminal from the Balkans, all “acting” in a setting almost out of their usual context, seem to be part of a geographical social and political demystification process. It looks like as if they are questioning their own status, making fun out of themselves.
Their drama, becomes humour…
I was posing all these thoughts of mine to Shahram whilst dining one evening at ‘Vino e Libri’ in Berlin, and suddenly everything became clearer in my mind, and I told him: ”you know Shahram, you are a clown.”
We ended up deciding to start working on a book project. “I need a book”, Shahram said. My idea was to give to this project the structure of a dynamic presentation about him as a clown, enabling the reader to “navigate” amongst all his various characters, thus revealing they have not been conceived as mere stereotypes for the sake of political propaganda but, instead, just part of a “clownish” parody. By means of this the artist reveals himself towards issues such as political and social instability, migration, loss of cultural identities, as dramatic consequences of the globalisation process that makes many of us feel de-contextualized, and not belonging to anywhere anymore.
I decided to develop the editorial concept within four magazine-like issues, to be published semi-annually, each one investigating two major topics part of his work.

Shahram Entekhabi is an Iranian born artist and architect whose work has been the subject of many exhibitions all over the world. He is currently living and working between London, Berlin and Tehran. Shahram’s practice is framed within an urban setting and diffuses the idea of the urban space being a reserve for the practice and performance of the white, middle class, hetro-sexual male. He explores these ideas via a variety of performative practices, using architecture, installation and digital media. He chooses to highlight individuals who are ordinarily marginalized and made invisible or are forced into self-ghettoization from the urban domain, such as migrant communities and their cultures, particularly the communities from the Middle East and its diaspora. The question of visibility and invisibility therefore is a theme he recurrently explores within his practice.