the extremist forces are taking people’s lives just because they seek freedom, whether it is through executions, brutal beatings or other means, what can we expect them to do with a bronze statue? How can they understand what this statue stands for? How can they understand motherhood and art?” (Rahnavard 2011).
Mother is later draped in cloth for some time, under the pretext of being restored. It, however, never went missing. The mother and child statue that actually went missing, in spring of 2010, was another, by another artist, located in another public square in Tehran. The two artworks and their nonfictional fates blur in the fictional realm. The two bodies become related and translate into one.
Rahnavard and Mousavi were put under house arrest in February 2011. In February 2019, they are still under house arrest. No trial has been held.
She wants to shout out to the woman in the black veil, wants to ask her to stay, ask them all to stay, wonders if the bus driver would take them there so they could get off together and circle the square and stare into the void, stare into the void together, together, but the woman in the black veil is already gone, and the bus is already back in traffic, and the mother in the colorful veil sitting next to her is busy rummaging through her bags, examining the souvenirs from her trip to the mausoleum.
What are the facts of the void inherited? What are its fictions? How much of what is deemed fact is fiction? How much of fiction is fact?
When an event has come to an end and only reverberations remain, can a hard line really be drawn between the two?
What do mausoleums pay homage to? The facts or the fictions of dead figures? What kinds of memories do they conjure? What kinds of stories do they tell?
What is the nature of memory? What does it do to us?
What is the use of memory in the larger context of history?
What is the use of stories in the larger context of politics?
What parts of memory are collective? What parts are private?
What is the use of looking back? What kind of looking back is useful?
For the present? For the future?
What is the use of looking to the dead?
How different are mausoleums and monuments? What different functions do they play in relation to the dead? To the living?
How do their eras and contexts define their roles?
How do their different relations with public space affect our relations with them and with the space?
Do we engage more emotionally with one and more intellectually with the other?
Why has one become more associated with religion than the other?
How does the presence of a tomb in one and its absence in the other affect our relations with them and with what they commemorate?
How differently do they affect our readings of the dead, of the past? Our continuous writing of them?
Why do we create idols of the dead? Why do we need them as symbols, as markers of time and place?
How do different generations look back at the revered dead of a particular era?
How does the passage of time and a change of context redefine their meanings and our relations with them?
corpse (33)
the blame is always elsewhere
She needs to see the sculptor. She hopes he can provide her with some answers. She asks a friend who knows him to take her to him. She knows he has wanted to sculpt the friend’s body for some time. She hopes he, with his connections, might lead her to clues about the missing statues, although none of them are his.
The two women arrive. One rings the bell. The door remains shut for a while. Cars pass. Cars brake for a second. The scent of kebab from a nearby restaurant mingles with the motor oil on the floor of an auto shop, mingles with the water cleansing windshields and tires in a car wash, mingles with the smoke coming out of exhaust pipes, with the scent of coffee from a café, with the sounds of iron beams being laid on the thirteenth floor of a building nearby, with the gaze of onlookers staring at recycled neon signs on a gallery wall that call for revolution, at the weight of chicken legs in glass cases, at the feet and mouths of kids running around, at the metal of another door just around the corner closed to everyone but its owners. The door in front of them remains closed, too, but only for one more second, and then it opens. The hinges make a noise as if the door has not opened for years, or it has opened, but whoever opened it didn’t mind the noise, or they minded, but decided the noise should remain as a signal that the outside is flowing in, and one needs to keep the door shut or shut it as quickly as possible.
She almost stumbles on the threshold as the door opens to them. Beyond is a garden that spreads as far as the eye can see, and she freezes right there on the threshold, as if this place is the culmination of all times that once were and are to come, as if this time is the concentration of all places around the city and beyond, as if nonexistence grows its roots into the soil of this here and now that is neither outside nor inside, giving life to an existence that speaks its own language, a language not understood by everyone, and even those who think they understand it may only be under the illusion that they do, and those who think they don’t understand it actually may. She closes the door and steps in behind the friend.
To the left, an adobe building sits silently. The friend tells her it’s a library. The friend walks on. She pauses. There is a lock on the door. Rusted. The windows are covered with old newspapers shaded with the residue of water that may have been meant for the flowers and trees, water not meant for the trees turned window coverings, turned collages, canvases, or papier-mâché bodies stored behind closed doors. The path winds, and the friend walks, and she follows behind making a list of all the things she needs to pay attention to or needs to ask, but only discreetly, because she doesn’t want anyone to know that she’s looking for the bronze bodies, the nonmoving bronze bodies that were publicly exposed to the private bodies of flesh and blood moving throughout the city, bronze bodies that had to stand still where they landed so that the city could mean its meaning, bronze bodies that, once stolen and moved, were, with their absence and silence, trying to signal failures of the city and its bodies and its meanings.
“Monuments are destroyed, altered or vandalized for a variety of reasons related to the meanings they have. One reason is certainly to demonstrate one’s opposition to what the work represents beyond its literal depiction of a person … Indeed, having this kind of effigy on which to enact opposition and to demonstrate that opposition to the world in a very visible fashion is a clear advantage of the presence of such works in public space…. People also deform or destroy a monument to demonstrate their opposition not to its subject matter—that is to the people, cause or belief it represents—but to the manner in which it does so” (Franck 2015).
Monuments may also be vandalized for reasons that have nothing to do with their subject matter or the manner in which they present it. They may be vandalized to demonstrate opposition to any one of the elements at work in the system that has given the monuments a presence in time and space. They may become sites of conflict not just between the people and the authorities in charge of the monuments, but also between the various factions of a regime keeping an eye on the spaces the monuments inhabit. They may become bodies used as tools for negotiation. Or they may simply be vandalized or stolen because the material they are built from has, for the vandals, monetary value far greater than their aesthetic, social, or historical value.
And so she goes looking, searching without asking, sifting through whatever the city and its bodies reveal, not wanting to excavate or exhume, not wanting to make a noise or draw attention to herself, hoping to slink quietly toward the lost bodies and resurrect them.
I sometimes wish that she weren’t so discreet, that she would take risks, even act carelessly, simply aim for the heart of the matter rather than tiptoe on the periphery. But it is not that easy, I know.
And I ask (her, myself) whether anything can be accomplished without taking risks, without making noi
se, without drawing attention. But I can also understand her hesitations.
If the search for the truths and their telling bring the seeker and the speaker to exile or to imprisonment, isn’t that one more voice silenced, one more dead body added to the list?
How far can she go before being silenced?
Is silence the death of the storyteller?
Or does the storyteller die only in physical death?
Does the storyteller ever really die?
How should one tell stories in the face of death?
Does the shadow of death that hangs over us haunt us or guide us?
The friend walks, and she follows. Dogs begin to bark. She stops where she is and looks around, hearing their voices, not seeing their faces. The friend turns and mumbles something reassuring, but it’s lost in the barking, and then they hear the words of the sculptor rising above, silencing the barking, and only then do they continue on the path, which meanders along the brick walls, which didn’t always exist but now run behind the bushes along the highway, which didn’t always exist but now does along the path that winds through the garden, which is not harnessed but is watered, which is not symmetrical or asymmetrical but haphazardly organized, and they walk until they arrive at an entryway with two benches along the walls, and underneath and over them dozens of baskets of fruit from the garden, persimmons and oranges and tangerines and shelled walnuts, and there, at the end, they reach another door and the man, the sculptor, the painter, who waits for them at the threshold.
Beyond the threshold, the two women sit, and he offers them tea or coffee, and they both ask for tea, and he walks to the kitchen, and she notices the sparkle in his eyes when he casts the friend a glance, a glance that is a gaze, a gaze following the contours of her body, the body she knows he desires to form from marble or bronze or adobe, the body she knows he admires as the body of a Greek or Roman goddess, the body she knows he wants to see naked but has not yet, the body she knows he has already begun to draw, the face, the neck, the shoulders, not yet the rest, with the touch of his gaze, not the touch of his fingers, not the touch of skin to skin, of fingers to belly, of fingernails to knees, of fingertips to inner thighs, but drawing nonetheless, waiting, waiting patiently, waiting hopefully.
He waits for the friend to shed her clothes and sit there on the stool then move the stool aside and lie down on the white sheet covering the paint-splashed gabbeh. He waits for the friend to unveil herself to him so he can make of her a memorial to the seduction and enigma embodied in her green eyes, which, though they won’t be green in the statue, will still seduce and mystify: absorbing, devouring, asking, demanding, winding, unwinding. Or he waits for the friend to say, no, I can’t do this, no, I don’t want to do this, so he can hold her hands in his one last time and say his good-bye as she walks away from him through the entryway and onto the path toward the rusted door with the noisy hinges and closes it behind her, so he can retreat to his studio with his memories of her body and move on to create on the canvas the bodies of the crows he is enamored with—the crow perched on a corpse, the crow spreading its majestic wings over the city, the crow piercing its prey with its beak, the crow tied with a golden rope, the crow keeping watch over an office, the crow that might become an angel or a demon, an eggplant or a jackal, garlic cloves or music notes, an ass or an owl, a bald head or a bowl, or whatever the whiteness of the canvas demands—while he waits for her to come back or for the next woman to show up at his door.
“There is a definite gaze on the female … and this gaze is controlling. The female is marked and sectioned off, and violence follows, either by death, exile, or the use of the body to create a new city” (Pippin 1999). This is one of the qualities Pippin envisions for the apocalypse.
He comes back from the kitchen with tea for them and a Turkish coffee for himself, and he and the friend are absorbed in conversation, exchanging news about the people they know, and she hears but does not hear what they are saying and keeps herself busy looking around: at sketches and clips from magazines and newspapers already yellow with age, at images of him or his work or interviews or reviews, at spray paints and tubes and brushes and an antique fan and a straw hat and piles of books, and he and the friend ask her if she’d mind if they worked for a while, and she says, no, no, of course I don’t mind, go ahead, and they leave the room and go into the studio and leave her in the sprawl of objects and words and art.
She puts her tea glass down and walks around and reads bits of the newspaper columns and looks at his sketches, postcards, and notes to himself, finds quotes that are brilliant or banal and random words jotted here and there that do not mean anything to her but perhaps mean something to him, and she hears the voices of the two in the studio talking about the stillness of the model and the movement of the artist, the exhaling of the model and the inhaling of the artist, the immortality of the creation and the ephemerality of the creator, about her body and his visions for the sculpture of her body, and she walks around and over to the chest at the corner closest to the kitchen, where she notices a pile of more recent newspapers, and she gets closer and sees highlighted headlines, and she gets closer and sees that they are about the statues gone missing, and she begins browsing, careful not to make a noise, and stashed among the pages she finds a few upside-down, handwritten notes in his slanted handwriting, which she tries to read while trying not to move anything, and on one note she picks out the words “unearthed, bronze, square, ears, mold, mother, child, dealer, trash, fresh (flesh?), interview, night, police officers, detective, open space, displaced, lover, crane, weight, mother,” and she notices a long numbered list on another, of which she can make out only: “What quality … share? What time …? … was about to…. Reactions and … of the officials? The value of bronze per kilogram …” She can still hear the two of them fervently discussing muscles and shades and sparkles and the gentleness of the material, so she peeks at the third page, and right before her eyes there is a simplified, hand-drawn map of a city marked with red dots all over, and the dots are connected by lines or dotted lines, and the lines are surrounded by bubbles and words and signs, and she thinks about taking the map with her or better yet taking a picture of it with her phone, which is in her purse, but before going back to the couch for her purse, she puts everything on the shelf back in its place, and as she unzips her purse to get her phone before walking back to the pile and taking pictures as fast as she can, she hears their voices and footsteps coming out of the studio, and she curses her luck and their timing.
When they reappear, she is sitting down, holding her tea in one hand, and she looks at him, wondering whether she could, whether she should, bring up the issue, ask questions, but she cannot read him, and she glances at the pile of newspapers with notes hidden in between, and she glances back at him, and still she cannot read him, and even if he has felt the weight of her glances, he does not heed them and keeps cleaning his hand with a handkerchief already saturated with crimson, and the friend is redoing her hair and says, we need to rush if we want to get to our next rendezvous on time, and she gets up, and the friend finishes her tea standing up, and she grabs her things and walks toward him and says, it was great to finally meet you in person and see your studio, thank you for the tea, hope to see you again soon, and she reaches out to shake his hand, and looking at his face up close, she notices how tired his eyes are, how burdened, and as he moves the handkerchief to his left hand and she takes his right in hers, she pauses, wondering whether she should ask, whether she should tell, whether she should talk. The friend interrupts the pause to say they really need to get going, but she really needs to ask, she really needs to know, so she begins to say something, but before she can get past her mumbling to the questions she needs to ask, he releases her hand, and she feels her fingers dangling in midair, and her ring, with its turquoise stone, feels looser on her finger, and as he takes a few steps toward the kitchen, she hears him muttering something under his breath, which she doesn’t really catch. The friend
nudges her, and they walk to the door, leaving him to clean the crimson color from his hands.
“Crime is an art, and sometimes art is a crime” (Bolaño, in an interview on Chilean television, quoted in López-Calvo 2015).
Whether we interpret dreams like the Greeks or the Sufis, as messages from the gods or the other world and thus prophetic and guiding, or believe, like the Mohaves and the Australian Aborigines, that “everything important was first dreamed in order to be” (Notley 2014), or think, in the Freudian tradition, that “all the material making up the content of a dream is in some way derived from experience, that is to say, has been reproduced or remembered in the dream” (Freud 2010) or that “a dream is the fulfilment of a wish” (Freud 2010), or consider them, following Jung and Maeder, “a spontaneous self-portrayal, in symbolic form, of the actual situation in the unconscious” (Jung 2010), we cannot deny the relation of dreams to the realities of our waking lives, to our pasts and our futures. We need to excavate them just as we excavate archives and memories. We need to record them, speak them, and analyze them as part of our (hi)stories. This is why those dreamt during or in the years following the events become indispensable to their trans(re)lation.
corpse (34)
families keep their silence
Corpse (4)
Age: 21
Gender: Female
Occupation: Student at Tehran University, BA in management, last semester
Date of Death: 30 Khordad 1388 / 20 June 2009
Place of Death: Tehran
Time of Death: Around 4 a.m.
Cause of Death: Hard blow to the head
Date of Burial: 1 Tir 1388 / 22 June 2009
trans(re)lating house one Page 6