The White Rabbit's Wandering: Samina Virani and the Art of Getting Gloriously Lost
SPRING 2026
UPDATED FOR 2026
THE RABBIT
HOLE
For over a decade, Virani has been chasing the invisible — the in-between, the things that slip through the cracks of what we call "reality." Her classrooms? Middle Eastern deserts where silence speaks louder than words. Costa Rican jungles thick with ancient knowing. Brazilian wilderness. Mediterranean port cities where East and West have been trading secrets for millennia. And now: a studio in Paris, a salon in her living room, and a brief on the desk at Google.
This is someone who literally deconstructed the concept of pilgrimage by putting it on a train — and who now applies that same esoteric rigour to corporate innovation labs. Both things are true. Neither cancels the other out. That's rather the point.
The deepest research isn't about finding answers. It's about learning to ask better questions while gloriously, mystically, utterly lost.
— SAMINA VIRANI14 DAYS, 7 ARTISTS
EXPRESS
In 2012, inspired by Attar's 12th-century Persian masterpiece The Conference of the Birds — where seven birds journey across seven valleys in search of enlightenment — Virani did what any reasonable artist would do: she recreated it as a 14-day train odyssey across Europe and into the Holy Land.
Seven artists from her collective "the rabbit hole" boarded in Barcelona. Each city was a valley, each border a veil to be lifted. They didn't perform at these places — they performed with them: staging provocations, unraveling narratives, tapping into what they called "magic consciousness" — that liminal space where logic loosens its grip and intuition takes the wheel.
Yes, somehow this mystical experiment also involved an Adidas sponsorship. If that doesn't capture the beautiful absurdity of the project, nothing will. The whole thing was captured on film by Gandja Monteiro. Go find it.
By 2021, all this wandering and wondering had crystallised into something teachable: the rabbit hole method — a process of poetical inquiry pulling from contemporary art, philosophy, mysticism, mathematics, and dance. Basically everything your art school professor told you couldn't possibly go together. Think of it as a toolkit for accessing the subliminal codes running beneath everyday consciousness. Structured enough to be repeatable. Wild enough to surprise you.
PARIS 2025–26
OF SHIFTING
MIRRORS
Here's where it gets beautifully strange. In her newest body of work, Virani has done what Borges described and made it walk, breathe, and last exactly one hour.
The Game of Shifting Mirrors is a four-part immersive ritual and performance for up to 25 people at a time. Each participant becomes a journeyer entering what Virani calls "a new ritual of seeing, a dance of reflections." Drawing from her ongoing research project the art of remembering and from techniques absorbed at Los Teatros de Los Sentidos in Barcelona, she wrote the script herself — profound, playful, precise.
Two actors — Rossella Cecili and Chiara Capitani — perform the piece. It begins as an interior journey of the self. Then it pivots. The room reconfigures. What was personal becomes interpersonal. The mirror you were looking into turns out to have someone else looking back.
It's been performed several times in Paris already. It runs in English. It adapts to almost any architectural space. The scenography is minimal. The effect is anything but.
This is the kind of work that doesn't announce itself loudly. It just quietly rearranges something inside you, and you only realise it on the Métro home.
THE LIVING ROOM SERIES
THE LOOKING
GLASS
Starting in 2025, Virani opened her Paris home to a new salon series — Through the Looking Glass — dedicated to exploring the mystical through the human condition. Think a Parisian soirée crossed with a consciousness lab. No velvet ropes. No panel format. Just people, mirrors, and questions that don't have good answers yet.
Themes orbit notions of "seen" and "being seen." The secret gaze. Mirroring of self and other. And the central provocation of her long-term research: what is it that connects us? A memory? What if we stop remembering?
New studio: Cesure. This year, Virani also moved into a new atelier at Cesure — a cultural and social space in Paris built around pluralism, solidarity, and the kind of cross-disciplinary friction that actually makes things. She's there creating, collaborating, and working on what she's calling "reflective poetry." Whatever that turns into, it will not be boring.
THE BABEL DIMENSION
BRANDS
CALL
Here's the version of Samina Virani that surprises people: for the past two decades, she's also been doing this at scale. First as a cultural strategist in New York, then through her own venture — Babel — she's been curating communities of people from wildly different backgrounds, regions, and worldviews, and putting them in rooms together to generate shared understanding.
These communities don't meet for networking. They meet for ethnographies. Documentary films. Creative labs. They're commissioned by organisations who have realised that what they actually need isn't more data — it's different eyes. In the past six months alone:
The rabbit hole method, it turns out, is just as useful when the brief comes from a Fortune 500 as when it comes from a festival in the desert. The questions are the same. The willingness to not know — to stay in the uncertainty long enough for something real to emerge — is exactly the thing that makes the work valuable.
IS NEVER LATE
Paris & global · the art of remembering
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