My Building 21 project is grounded in my long-term engagement with the fictional characters who inhabit Persian tales, and it was shaped through sitting with one of these fictional characters in the winter of 2026. In this project, I focused on a fictional character named Āl, who has lived among Persian-speaking communities for centuries. I wanted to take her seriously, and see what emerges when we refuse to reduce her to a product of human imagination, a symbol, or a pathology.

Inspired by Bruno Latour’s Modes of Existence, and in conversation with other scholars and their projects in Building 21, I approach Āl as a “being of fiction” with her own mode of existence: a particular way of being real in the world, with its own forms of attachment, agency, and verification. To acknowledge the multifaceted existence of fictional beings, I designed a syllabus to provide essential sources for encountering her. This syllabus brings together philosophical reflections on ontology, existence, reverie, imagination, and abjection; anthropological studies of metaphysics and the unseen world; Islamic thought on khayāl (imagination), wonders and rarities; and historical and contemporary documents tracing Āl’s presence in different times, places and languages.

This syllabus provides a framework for asking: What networks of association sustain the existence of fictional beings? In what ways do these beings come to inhabit our worlds? Through what relations do we live with them? What new kinds of “we” do they make? How do they make worlds, connect worlds, and where do their worlds overlap with ours? How might attending to nonhuman forms of life unsettle our familiar ways of being?

In grappling with these questions, I hope to bring a different understanding into being: one that traces how the human is shaped by what exceeds it, and how encounters with these other beings might generate new concepts, possibilities, and futures.