‘And film what?’
‘Anything. Absolutely anything. You see, as all of us very well know, there’s a disjunction between the globalization of knowledge and the knowledge of globalization. And that’s what this is all about. Redressing the balance. So to speak.’
‘Indeed. Tell me. Is this a three-chip camera?’
‘No.’
‘That’s OK. No worries. It’s a nice gadget.’ After a few minutes of embarrassing silence, I politely thank the officer for his time and leave him holding the camera absent-mindedly in one hand, staring thoughtfully at his owlet.
On my way out of the headquarters, I manage to pick up a conversation with three elderly women who are members of the militia, a troika of Darth Vaders cloaked in silky black veils, silently walking the headquarters in the dim fluorescent light. As it happens, all three are simply thrilled about Zirzamin, raving on about how easy it is to make friends and applauding the soundproof windows. One of the women moved to Elahieh in north Tehran when her husband got a promotion, but then ‘When we saw what it was like, everyone for themselves, nobody saying hello in the streets anymore, well then we moved right back here to Zirzamin, I swear to God, we all missed it so much it broke my heart.’
In the cab home across the Zirzamin estate, I remember a pamphlet from the thirties, printed by the modernist radicals CIAM, the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne, with the catchy title CAN OUR CITIES SURVIVE? I picture them in their tweed jackets and immaculate side partings, sipping hot tea with the bassijis, patiently explaining the pending liberation of humanity from the chaotic, labyrinthine weight of history, via the pure rhythms of the sublime habitation machine and its promise of a new age for mankind.
The sun is slowly setting over the enormous outline of blocks 16 to 26. The cab driver shifts into second gear, rolls up his window and smiles, for no apparent reason.
The first time I heard of Zirzamin was when San took me to the Shandiz establishment several months ago, where food is served à la Mashhad, a touch heavier than the usual Persian slop, with an egg yolk added to the already copious hunks of butter.
‘A fucking monument,’ she began by saying, stuffing a thin slab of flat bread wrapped around a slice of raw onion and full-fat yogurt into her sizeable mouth. ‘Not to the genius of urban planners, no, of course not. But to The Dawn of Irony.’
Placed before us were oblong steel plates heaped with grilled lamb cutlets and two piles of buttered rice on oval platters. San interrupted her description of Zirzamin to explain the gist of Mashhad culinary customs, enumerating every calorific detail like a cooking program presenter as she grabbed a raw egg from the plastic bowl between the meat platters, slowly opening a small crack in the eggshell with a fork, just large enough for the yolk to flop down on to the tip of her rice pile.
San is the type who is rarely aware of the comic effect of explaining foreign countries to their own citizens, be it the cuisine or the architecture, the aesthetics or the politics, laying out whatever is often painfully convoluted to the local audience in irrefutably simple terms, chiding and reprimanding as if she were scrutinizing a summer salad buffet. What we have here is a decent aceito balsamico, a good choice of chèvre, unfortunately not enough gherkins, nor napkins. But not your fault. You don’t have a history of these things, you see.
‘So anyway. Why the Dawn of Irony? Because along came 1979,’ she leaned forward across the table, ‘Year of the revolution, yes, OK, but also the beginning of the end of orthodox Modernism. Since 1979, no ideological agenda can afford such good faith, pure and simple. Not in politics, not in architecture. Such serious revolutionary promise. I mean, this so-called Islamic Republic, it wants to be as revolutionary as the Shah. At least as revolutionary as the Shah. But with the economy in ruins, and the administration incompetent, and oil prices being a fraction of what they were, and the teenage generations completely, like, fuck YOU, it has to be more shrewd, more populist, they have to compromise and improvise, I mean, look at their building projects –’
San didn’t finish her sentence but reached for another sheet of bread, stuffing it with a blob of yogurt, shards of raw onion, fresh peppermint, basil and cilantro. I watched a drop of yogurt dribble out the side and just miss her Jil Sander jacket sleeve, landing instead on the call button of her cellphone.
We were already drunk on the homemade vodka we’d discreetly been pouring into the water carafe, and I was considering making a pass at her under the restaurant table when San’s greasy Nokia started clicking and purring at us from beside her plate. She took a brief look at the display, wiped the yogurt off the call button with her thumb and crooned ‘heeeey’ into the phone, as if she were hosting ‘Late Nights with Janis’ on Jazz FM.
I withdrew my right leg and started blending the yolk into the rice with my fork, then grabbed my jacket and asked for the restrooms. I managed to hail a taxi on the street outside, transcribing the conversation in a notebook on the way to my hotel.
There are only six weeks left until the opening, and I spend the next five days in my Zirzamin apartment, doing very little besides talking to designers, terrarium suppliers, local papers and foreign diplomats on my phone and working my way through my parsnet. net email account, living off home deliveries of Pizza Mexiki with spicy ketchup and pasty Russian salads.
Thursday morning, I’m woken up by a phone call from a secretary of Dr Tan Christenhuber, who explains that Stella had recommended me as a speaker for a forum in Beirut, a conference on ‘counter-adjusted site-specific art practices in the region’.
‘Please do come over. Stella will take care of the academic side of things, and we’ll do the rest, so many people you should meet, and anyway we’ll make sure you enjoy yourself.’ I don’t quite know what to make of the invitation, but I’m tremendously flattered, if slightly apprehensive.
This morning, for the first time since my stay in Shekufeh prison, I feel like frequenting the Tehran art scene. I find myself looking forward to the fascinated, knowing looks on people’s faces. Some, I imagine, will be quick to declare me persona non grata, nervous about the effect a ‘political’ might have on their careers. But even this I find tremendously flattering, in a way. I may even start this afternoon by paying a visit to Mina and taking a good look at her ‘Exile of Homeland’ series.
The blonde with the nose-job who opens the door of the ground-floor Zirzamin studio is wearing navel rings, toe rings, ankle bracelets, a Metallica baseball cap and a ripped tank-top with questionably obvious paint stains, in flaming red and fiery orange. She smiles and ushers me in, and I’m relieved as I recognize Mina by a slim trace of Chloë by Karl Lagerfeld.
Mina’s housemate sports the fashionable dervish look – a full, thick beard, straight hair down his shoulders and a doe-eyed gaze of dreamy innocence. He looks terrifyingly dull, and at first I avoid getting into a conversation with him, but soon find him to be very pleasant, despite his sermons on the cowardice of all the young artists currently trying to emigrate to Canada and London. The dervish, I now remember, is a former student of Cyrus’s, who ascribes the young man with much artistic talent and intellectual promise.
After several glasses of chaii, I’m horrified as the housemate threatens to play some Simon & Garfunkel on his guitar, but thankfully, he changes his mind and plays a tape instead. The housemate’s artwork – pastel expressionism with occasional icons of depression and dread, a spicy combination currently dominating the native scene – is no less devastating than Mina’s pigeons. Mina explains that she also does ‘installations, performances, drawings, sculptures and videos as well’, but I do not insist on seeing them, feeling deeply grateful when she suggests a walk across the housing estate to the Zirzamin youth club to witness a popular debating session held every Wednesday. This week’s subject is ‘Sexual Discrimination’.
The room is packed with nervous adolescents, over half of whom are girls. A small, perky and incredibly well-read sixteen-year-old is hosting the debate, trying to
steer the discussion towards his pet theories on social performance and sexual constructivism, but only a handful of participants are willing to hear him out, let alone agree.
‘Of course you need equal rights and stuff’, they artfully concede, ‘but in the end, there are, like, natural values, and, you know, masculine and feminine traits, and that’s the way it’s got to be.’ After an hour or so I turn toward my companions to see how they’re taking the acrimonious monologues erupting around them, to find their seats empty. Fighting a sneaking, demoralizing feeling of hurt pride, I make my way outside to hail a taxi.
The driver, seventeen years old at most, is friendly and talkative. As we inch our way through the rush-hour traffic tightly enclosing Zirzamin on all sides, we share a pack of Marlboro Medium and listen to a tape recording of Carlos Santana, live in Brussels. Well she a black magic woman a black magic woman let me hear you sing it she a black magic woman – I can’t hear you – she a black magic woman. When we turn the corner of block 44D, I look up to the twentieth floor to see whether my living-room lights are on.
Though once again discouraged by the art thing and its idiosyncracies, I half-heartedly agree to attend one of Mina’s biweekly performance pieces. This week, Mina has proceeded to wrap herself in thirty feet of aluminum foil on the sixth floor of an uptown shopping mall. A crowd quickly gathers, passersby carefully prodding her, some uptown women kicking her as hard as their Gucci boots will allow. Three young dudes in matching combat trousers and baseball caps start making jokes about group sex with Egyptian mummies, giggling hysterically at each other. As the crowd grows, a security officer starts nervously asking anyone who’ll pay him any attention ‘Would someone please explain to me the meaning of this work?’ over and over again.
The crowd merely watches him, most of the audience assuming the guard to be part of the performance piece, as he continues to scream ‘Would SOMEONE explain the MEANING of this WORK?’ into the onlookers’ faces. At some point he decides that it doesn’t concur with the shopping mall’s fire regulations. So he politely asks the kitchen foil to stand up and leave, which it does, dragging behind it long strips of glistening aluminum reflecting the pink and yellow neon of the shop windows.
I’m impressed in particular by the security guard and the kaleidoscopic exit, but only to be all the more vexed when the Golrang Gallery opening that week features lovingly pasted collages of peace signs and John and Yoko portraits. To make things even more wretched, during the Conceptual Art Festival at the Azad Art Academy, a student smears her face and arms with red paint, and slowly dances to reggae music. In front of her, a pile of bones, behind her, anti-war slogans decorating the wall. Further on, a boy with a linen bedspread pulled down over his head is seated in front of a mirror, ‘WHO AM I?’ scribbled on it in many different languages. His piece is called ‘Sleep of One Thousand Destinies (Minus One)’.
With only four weeks left until the vernissage of the Promessa, I still have no word from the militia. The officer hasn’t left me a private phone number, and the headquarters have been abandoned for the two weeks following the Persian New Year, empty save for the devoted Darth Vader troika still typing up letters and invoices in the hushed bassiji bungalow. I thus have little choice but to make the SAC project the crowning piece on display, which in point of fact, was Stella’s idea entirely.
After several long walks through south Tehran, she’d suggested printing stickers with the nifty phrase ‘SAC – Style Art Contemporain’ in gold lettering, which we could stick on anything we found attractive in visual make-up. Abandoned footbridges, police stations, grimy shop windows with glass and plastic bric-a-brac, butchers’ shops in perfectly sanitized white halls with fluorescent lighting, propaganda murals, airport waiting lounges, supermarket shelves and wedding dress rental agencies. The selected SAC sites and objects could then be documented in the form of crude oil paintings, painted and signed by a transsexual, color-blind anorexic with a rare skin disease whom I briefly met in the border town of Zahedan last year.
Early the following week I call Mina once more, complimenting her on the performance in the shopping mall, and we spend over an hour on the phone, passionately agreeing on the promising, thrilling, indeed electrifying state of the local art scene. After which we decide to meet, later on that day, in the parking lot by the National Library.
It’s raining when we meet, just after Mina’s working hours, in front of her battered and rusty 1973 Chevrolet Camaro, and we sit in the car listening to an early Franz Ferdinand demo, sharing a packet of Super Golden Love Deluxe. It’s getting dark by the time we run out of cigarettes, which is when Mina finally goes down on me, then lightly runs her palm against the tip of my penis until I come over her dashboard.
Later, as she’s speeding up Enqelab Avenue towards my apartment in the heavy spring rain, I unbutton her Mango slacks and stroke her clit until she can barely drive anymore, almost slamming into a taxi which is backing into the main street from a side alley. By the time we arrive in Zirzamin, she’s very ardent, kissing me in the elevator as if she were counting my molars with her tongue. Mina’s enthusiasm is intensely unattractive, so much so that when we get to my bedroom, I roll over with my back to her, feigning exhaustion and staring at the wall, ignoring her attempts to talk to me until she finally gets up and leaves. Relieved, I lock the door and settle down by the kitchen window, just in time to watch her hurry towards her Chevrolet in the rain.
After opening a bottle of scotch in a spirit of celebration, I start flicking through the notes in my older notebooks. Zsa Zsa to Malraux, Promessa, New Year’s 1970: Le ton de votre voix est plein de – d’humanité. Je n’aime pas l’humanité qui est faite de la contemplation de la souffrance. Sanskrit ghoizdo both terror and anger, Geist both spectre and mind, as in esprit and spirit. Entry under Geist in Gebrüder Grimm dictionary 120 pages long. Perser ohne Hass im freien Lichte lebend (Hegel). I mumble aloud as I read, then brusquely open the living-room window and throw out the notebook, watching it flutter and fall into the showery dark of the courtyard, wondering why I’d just done so.
This is when I remember slipping my check into one of my older notebooks the day we were released from Shekufeh. After opening and carefully shaking out every single one in the pile by the Corbusier armchair, I rush to the elevator, cursing on the way down. I spend almost an hour looking for my notebook in a midnight drizzle before returning to the apartment empty-handed.
Last days in London before flying back to the motherland Wednesday. Looks like things worked out with the producers. And I also heard that something is working out in Beirut for you, which is coooooool. Beirut is ace. So I’m enjoying the last days in Soho. Having sushi every day. Today: sushi à l’anglaise, which means sushi large as a roast. Difference is: a roast you can eat in bites, whereas a sushi you have to stick in your mouth in one big go. So you can imagine me standing around butt-naked in my hotel room, only wearing boxer shorts and that silly yellow Kangoe you brought along from Kuala Lumpur or wherever that was, sticking sushi double whoppers in my mouth. But trying to look as dignified as I can! Noblesse oblige. And there was a New Order show. I had two tickets for the suite, from where you didn’t see much of the show unfortunately, but I was invited to the after-show party, Bernard and Stephen and their friends, and everyone was disguised as their favorite song, and there was this guy disguised as ‘The Octopus’s Garden’, and it took me an hour to realize it was Edward Said. So good luck with the Promessa. And you wish me luck with Twenty. Feels special this project. Think this might be The Big One. Back in Tehran tomorrow you coming to the party in Elahieh? XXX Mehrangeeeez. PS Still shellshocked by the Shekufeh experience. You OK?
We’re a group of four, on our way to the scenic Elahie quarter of north Tehran. Palatial nouveau riche apartments, foreign embassies, European expats with local kitchen helps and Southeast Asian nannies. In the back seat of our shared taxi, San raises her voice until it’s loud enough to be noticed over the blaring tape deck. I still canno
t make out what she’s saying, but I sense that it’s sure to spark a row with Mehrangiz, who, surely enough, takes the bait eagerly and hungrily.
In the rear-view mirror, I watch Mehrangiz roll her eyes in luscious, jeering sarcasm, bellowing something about fascist paranoia, the maturity of the Iranian multitudes, and Edward Said.
Mehrangiz is visibly in a good mood. Not only has she found all the producers she needs for the ‘Twenty’ project, she has also been invited to the Venice Biennial, and according to Ordak magazine, her latest video installation, showing blurry shots of drowning women wrapped in dark red veils with concrete weights shaped into Farsi calligraphy chained to their feet, reached record sales figures at her Paris gallery. The NY Times called Mehrangiz’s work a ‘brave, courageous, undaunted cri de coeur of the Islamic woman, an artist who has braved the dungeons and torture chambers of the Mullah regime’, proposing she be nominated for the Rotterdam Planetary Peace Prize.
I would usually enjoy the conversation unfolding on the back seat of the car, but I’m packed into the front passenger seat with the gigantic frame of Cyrus Rahati, and the raisin vodka gimlets we’ve had in his studio by way of an apéritif have caused a terrific, painful throbbing in my head. San orders the driver to turn up the music, and the muggy air in the car is filled with Turkish keyboard riffs and the clanging of a cheap drum computer. Everyone except myself starts cheering and clapping to the rhythm.
We’re the first to arrive at the apartment, where the interior décor is more reminiscent of Hackney than Tehran, north or south. In the kitchen, a framed banner says ‘New Brutalism’ in army stencils, while in strategic locations throughout the apartment, you chance upon tiny ceramic bowls with traditional motifs, filled with sour plums, pistachios, pickled eggplant, sliced celery or olives in ground pomegranate. I savor a slice of eggplant, then use the tablecloth to wipe the vinegar from my fingers and try the celery.
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