Farsi, Kurdish, Arabic dialect
On September 16, 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman named Jina (Mahsa) Amini died in Tehran, Iran while in the custody of the so-called morality police. Her death has triggered nation-wide protests. This multi-media creative piece, entitled "Woman, Life, Freedom; The Sounds of A Revolution”, tries to depict the Iranian women’s struggle against the establishment of the Iranian regime since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In so doing, eleven sounds have been extracted from the recordings of the 1979, 2009, 2021 and the 2022 protests, shared on social media from within Iran. The accompanied text situates the sounds within their historic, geographic and political contexts.
It is based on data collected from the virtual space.
"Through this film, we want to explore the Iranian women’s resistance since 1979. The film is a combination of sounds and texts that show 10 important points in the history of women’s struggle since 1979; starting from International Women’s Day march in 1979 against Khomeini’s mandatory hijab decree, 2009 Green Movement (the killing of Neda Agha Soltan that went viral on social media for the first time), 2021 Protest against water shortage (the beating of a female protester), and the rest are based on the 2022 Jina Mahsa Amini protests (the schoolgirls’ protests, the killing of Nika Shakarami, Tehran Metro protest against systematic patriarchy, the Kurdish lullaby of Shouresh Nikanm’s mother, the Chehelom protests in cemeteries, and the singing of female political prisoners in Evin prison). The sounds are part of a bigger archive, collected from the online released videos posted by Iranian protesters on different social media platforms. Sounds are accompanied by texts which provide the context of each episode, taking the audiences into a sensory experience of a revolution they haven’t been part of. They cannot see, but they can hear and feel the fear, anger, rage, and hope.
Our project – a multi-layered, critical study of socio-political movements in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution – is based on exploring the geographies of sound, space, politics and feminism. These are the list of our findings: 1) foregrounding the unheard voices of protesters inside Iran through archive methodologies 2) reflecting on the systematic production of inequality, oppressive urban space, non-citizens, and the discrimination against different ethnic, gender and other marginalised groups by the Iranian regime, and 3) constructing a short exploratory sound film from historic and contemporary witness recordings of protest generated and shared via social media.
Making this exploratory, creative sound film is helping audience to imagine the geographies of oppression through sound. The sound technology, coupled with text, added a sensory dimension to the perception of the production of space beyond the visual dimensions. Audiences cannot see but they can read and hear. They read the exact date and location of the happenings and a brief reflection on the context, then they can hear the voices. Through this film, the audience, who is located in different parts of the world, is now familiar with the diverse geographies of protest in Iran.
The main challenge we encounter however, was to find the right method for categorising the videoclips. The video clips were added on the social media platforms on an unprecedented speed. To give a context, the Farsi version of Mahsa Amini name for instance, #mahsaamini, twitted more than 274 million times in 24 days after her death. In so doing, we divided the video clips into two main categories of individual struggle of women and collective protests of people, so in this way we could shed light on both the oppression and resistance at the same time."