Pre-last Thursday of June the 22nd, we will welcome artist, architect, researcher and publisher Golnar Abbasi in the SEA Foundation’s reading circle. Together we will read the suggested essay called Women Reflected in Their Own History published by e-flux in October 2022. The text was anonymously written by L., an Iranian writer. As explained by e-flus, “the text was originally published in Persian on the Iranian feminist platform Harass Watch, on September 28, 2022. The first English translation of the text was published on the Arab ezine Jadaliyya on October 5, 2022.”

Women Reflected in Their Own History

The essay written by female writer L. draws from her experience of living in contemporary Iran/the Islamic Republic of Iran. In September 2022, protests erupted in the country after a young Kurdish woman Masha Amini (also known as Jina Amini) was arrested by a religious mortality police because she was not dressed according to the governmental standards and died consequently. L., who went to demonstrate alongside other women and men against the oppressive regime, elaborates on closing a gap between seeing the images of protests and being physically part of the moving, stimulating body in the street.

The host of this reading fold, Golnar Abbasi, finds the essay relevant to the SEA Foundaiton’s currently researched fold #07 on Solidarity as it allows us to think about revolutions through an economy of images, the images which make the bodies of women* visible and speculates about the forms of resistance on the ground and in the virtual space that connect us. The facelessness and namelessness of the writer also opens up the conversation on solidarity with not only human bodies but also non-human and material things.

L.

L, the anonymous author of the text, claims to be a resident of a little town outside Tehran. She must be between her late twenties and early forties. In an almost total absence of fair and unbiased journalism in the Islamic Republic, and due to the difficulty of translating between contexts in which the protests are moving ahead, the poetic prose and theorizations of L, her personal, sensual, and affective articulations, resonate with what other individuals have experienced. (as published by e-flux)

Read the text here

Golnar Abbasi

Golnar Abbasi is an artist, architect, researcher, and publisher. Her work consists of a hybrid of practices such as research, writing, curating, organising, independent publishing, teaching, making, and spatial intervention. She is a founder and editor of Sarmad, a platform dedicated to politics of image and practices of image-making; and a co-founder of the collective of cognitarians/makers WORKNOT! devoted to discuss precarities of living practices today through spatial interventions as well as research. Her work is also concerned with the notion(s) of spatiality, coloniality, practices of resistance and construction of histories. 

She holds a Masters degree from The Berlage and has been in residence at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Faculty of Architecture and Urban Environment, TU Delft, where she conducts her academic project on politics of domesticity. She teaches at Willem de Kooning Academie (Social Practices), Piet Zwarte Instituut (MIARD), and the Faculty of Architecture at TU Delft, along with exploring experimental pedagogical practices within the framework of Sarmad. 

Her work has been shown in Venice Biennale of Architecture, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Architecture Banal, among others. 

Golnar Abbasi website

The programme of reading sessions:

25.05.2023 reading with Charlotte Jarvis
in fold #07 on Solidarity

30.03.2023 reading with Doris Hardeman
23.02.2023 reading with Risk Hazekamp
26.01.2023 reading with Gladys Zeevaarders
in fold #06 on Reimagining

27.10.2022 reading with Anna Zvyagintseva
05.10.2022 reading with Jun Zhang
25.08.2022 reading with Christopher van Ginhoven Rey
in fold #04 on Awakening

02.12.2021 reading with Laura Castro
18.11.2021 reading with Sophia Holst
16.09.2021 reading with Amy Franceschini
in fold #02 on Commons

08.07.2021 reading with Sheng-Wen Lo
17.06.2021 reading with Katarina Jazbec
20.05.2021 reading with Mari Kesi-Korsu
in fold #01 on Empathy

More any suggestions for reading? Check out the Solidarity recommended booklist